Oh come back, whatever heart
you have left. It is my life
you save. The poem is done.
—John Wieners
This from the last 3 lines of Wieners’ “A Poem
for Painters,”
in his San Francisco masterpiece The Hotel
Wentley Poems.
Somewhere in Polk Gulch, purportedly about
being painted
by Paul Klee, nine years and ten days before
I, myself,
crawled through a drainpipe in Fort Smith,
Arkansas, ugly
and slapped.
I cried, too, halfway between San Francisco
and Boston, knowing even then, perhaps, that
I’d be nowhere
but anywhere until I was either here or
there. Here being
one block down from the eastern tip of Nob
Hill, which is
just a few short blocks east of Polk Gulch, which,
also, to-
wards (or almost to), I walk almost
daily. This, the neighbor-
hood of the Hotel Wentley at a certain time. This is as certain
as can be, that it is less than a mile from
me, now, sitting at
my desk, looking over the rooftops of the
Tenderloin to
my right, and the nibs of the landmark
shortscrapers
of the Financial District to my left. I had
the great honor
of hearing him read from his own voice, in
person, a
couple of times when he was alive. And also, when he
was alive (somewhat, it seemed to me) at the
Corbetts’
party in the South End (Boston, of course – so
grand
were Bill and Beverly’s parties there, so
lucky I felt,
and if ever there were a man as good at paying
homage,
be it to greats such as Wieners or to
unknowns, such as I
was when I took my very first poetry class at
MIT,
where it was free to me, an employee, just
under 30
years old).
This particular party, held shortly after the
inaugural of Pressed Wafer, a press the
name of which
derived from another line of John Wieners’
poetry. And
it was there that I first officially met him,
Wieners. I’ve
no idea exactly what I said to him but I do
remember
cradling his hand for a moment,
over-excitedly, a
hand that, as I do recall, could rarely be
seen, only
emerging occasionally from whatever
longer-than-
arms’-length jacket he’d be wearing. But when
they did stretch through and out of those
overly long
sleeves, they’d reach out—through Kentucky and
over the Hoover Dam—like a bridge across a
fucked-
up continent, and to a down and outcast heart,
which
is how I at least think of mine now,
mouldering, even,
never able to crack, though, like Klee’s
poetried
portrait, or the memory of that lovely and
surreal
party held in honor of a man who was and is a
superhero to many, certainly to myself. All of
this just clings to my insides, gripping at
lung and
tarnish, at whatever heart there is or might
be. It’d
be nothing but a hollow wish, this living,
during
times like these, were it not for you and
yours
to come and save. My gratitude to you all,
those who are always at the rescue.
