Walking with Dad

My father was an architect.

He designed medical dental offices,

suburban bank branches,

a some modest houses,

nothing monumental or heroic.

But he had his heroes,

the twentieth century moderns

like Frank Lloyd Wright

and Le Corbusier.

He even worked briefly

as a young architect

for the distinguished

San Francisco firm,

Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons.

I have travelled to some

monumental, historic places

over the last couple of

decades. Gothic cathedrals,

holy sites in Jerusalem and Nazareth,

the jungled temples

of Angkor Wat, the gilded

and lacquered temples

of Luang Prabang.

Wept at the monuments

to the fallen, the 58,000 names

inscribed on the plunging black

granite wall of the Vietnam War

Memorial, and the 2,982 names

on the parapet of the 9/11 pits.

I bring Dad with me, in my heart

or on my shoulder, like

what do you think of this, Dad?

I wish you were here to see this.

And I know that he’d weep too.

I know that’s a gift from him.

We cry easily and freely

in the presence of spirit

and beauty wrought in stone.

We’ve just returned from a tour

to Spain and Portugal and

we went to many cathredrals,

palaces, museums, memorials.

Some are visited by so many

people that you need a ticket

to join the throngs of visitors.

Santiago de Compostela,

the final destination

of the Camino pilgrims, and

the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s

wondrous unfinished cathedral

still under construction,

what he intended to be

a Bible made of stone.

Dad liked cathedrals, chapels,

the simple and the grand.

I wonder what he would have

thought about Frank Gehry’s

pierced titanium-skinned 

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao?

Architects as heroes, I know

he would be impressed and

we could talk about it in a way

that we could never talk of other things.

Those crowded places have

a power you can feel,

the presence of God or even

just the accumulated awe

of the millions who have been there.

For me though, the quiet places,

the six hundred year-old

side altars in the Cathedrals 

of Barcelona and Leon, paintings

and sculptures dimmed and faded

by centuries of candle soot,

a parish church in Lisbon

or Obidos, a lesser church

in Santiago Compostela,

this is where I carry Dad.

I don’t remember ever being

in a church with him when

I was growing up. He never

spoke about his faith.

Unless we were talking

about architecture, that’s

when he lit up.

There was one time when

he got to be a heroic architect,

a designer of a beautiful church,

St Margarets Episcopal Church

in Palm Desert, California.

It’s a simple exterior, a classic

cruciform footprint in plan,

but with tall windows, hammer trusses

to support the high roof

crowned with translucent glass

that bathes the interior with light.

The window behind the altar

is clear, not stained glass,

with the rocky slope of

the desert mountain rising

up behind it. Dad, you got to be

a visionary in full, that time.

On visiting the 9/11 Memorial

There’s a window washer 

on the glass eye of the Oculus.

White spines jut out and up

like skeletal wings or fins.

Inside we descend to the vast

open floor with a ceiling as high

as a cathedral bathed in the 

bright gray light of this day.

People are lined up to take

photos of themselves sitting

on the sword throne from

the popular Netflix series.

We continue through this

vast underground mall.

Everything is bone white and ribbed.

Have we been swallowed like Jonah?

A whale who seems to have feasted

on Longines, Breitling and Boss.

Apple, Kate Spade and Swarovski

We just want find the 9/11 Memorial.

Arrows point the way to the new

One World Observation Deck.

We are looking for the reflecting pools,

the monument honoring the dead.

At the far end of the subterranean

white corridor we emerge

to the ferry terminal? where did we

miss the path, the door, the exit?

Man says go back all the way to

the stairs at the other end of the

white corridor. Wrong again, it’s

as if we are in an Escher illusion.

One more kind person says to us

“The shortest distance between

two points is a straight line, right?"

Go back all the way that you just came

and go out the revolving doors

on your right at the end. The stairs

go up to the plaza. And so they did

and so did we. To the memorial.

There. Beyond the trees, people

line the edges. It’s concentric squares

a pit within a pit, with water hissing

down the sides to form a square

reflecting pool with dark square void

at the center where the water

vanishes from view. You can not see

the bottom, wherever that might be.

But you can hear it. Sizzling.

The waist high polished black granite

parapet has the names of the dead incised

into it, each letter outlined with bronze.

We touch them, run our fingers across

them as if we were reading braille.

There are 3,000 of them, we can not

touch them all, but I do touch

Norma Taddei, Aida Rosario,

Sean Booker, Sr, Peter Craig Alderman

Caleb Arron Dack, Chantal Vincelli,

Rajesh Arjan Mirpuri, Stuart Soo-jin Lee...

On the way back to the Fulton Street

subway station, we pass life-size bronze

statues of a rhinoceros about to play

a game of chess with a dogman in a suit.

A woman with a rabbit head reading a book

sits beside an elephant drinking a cup of tea.

A steady stream of visitors pose with

the bronzes or gaze into the memorial pit. 

Markers

The name card was missing

on the stamped aluminum

grave marker. Only the frame

remained. Patented apparently.

Numbers 1276798 and 1573268.

A dozen steps away,

at the foot of an oak,

a small wooden cross,

leans to one side.

No claim, no name but

loved enough by someone

to stick a single stem

of pink plastic flowers

in the ground beside it.

Wm. I. Armstrong, who served

in the 3rd Ohio Infantry

has an upright slab

of pale granite.

A fist-sized stone secures

three strands of gold and silver

pea-sized beads on a half-buried boulder.

Chrysanthemums, roses,

carnations, daisies, and begonias

adorn the grave of Haley Ann

who was born and died on the same day.

Flags and eagles, angels,

an elephant and a faded

can of Budweiser 

lie at the feet of a life-sized

iron silhouette of a cowboy

leaning against a tree.

Tiny burrs have clung to

the legs of our pants, our

socks, and shoe laces and

it’s ninety degrees in the

parched weed shade

of this old cemetery.

We don’t notice until

we leave.

'fifty nine

San Joaquin sidewalk

at ten remembers

five o’clock’s heat.

warns my feet,

stay off the blacktop.

The turf beside it

lightly tickles my soles,

until I step on

a random sticker

in a patch of bur weed.

The sprinklers are going

so I go back on the sidewalk.

The cool wet concrete

soothes the sting.

There’s a mockingbird

in an elm tree across

the street singing

his version of the afternoon

ice cream truck jingle.

No ice cream tonight,

I’d gladly turn the handle,

but slices of ice cold

watermelon will do.

We can shriek and spit

black seeds at each other.

And maybe we can sneak

a slice of some leftover

chocolate pie.

Out in the darkness

away from the house

we lie back on the grass

and look for the red winking

wing lights of airplanes

heading east.

And sometimes,

if we’re lucky, we track

the tiny white speck

of Sputnik as it

crosses the sky.

One the way to the office and back

In the morning:

the rattle of the struggling

ventilation system

in the underground garage

blends with the chatter

of a hundred wild parrots

clamoring in the naked poplars

in the park next to the office towers.

a complaint against the frigid

red december dawn?

I wonder if they remember

somewhere in their

emerald feathered breasts,

a fruited forest,

of plenitude and warmth,

where the sweetest fruits lie

close to the serpent's

unblinking eye.

--------

In the afternoon:

The Salvation Army lady,

well wrapped in Christmas muffler,

plays her butterscotch-sweet harmonica song

outside the Jackson Street Safeway.

She's as cheerful as her bucket.

Three girls, two boys,

-none of them past thirteen-

skitter up the sidewalk laughing.

The youngest boy tosses a cup in the air

and fails to catch it.

Ice scatters across the pavement

landing near the feet of an old man

sitting on the edge of a planter.

He's swathed in many cast off layers,

and all his goods are stashed in bags and bundles

stacked between his knees.

The children dash across the street

and one of the girls hoarsely whispers,

-you almost hit that old man!

The kid who'd tossed the cup

tosses a taunt over his shoulder

in a voice that has yet to change

-fuck you! and laughs with all the

unbottled and unconscious glee

and naive cruelty that beardless boys

sometimes overflow with

and whom we hope grow out of it

before they own a business

or run for office.

Three young men with neatly trimmed beards

and casually hip office attire, pass me by.

one of them says

-they have some pretty good shit

and the portions are really big.

Coming down the causeway off the bridge,

the sky behind the skeletons of the new towers

rising South of Market is colored more

like Easter eggs than Christmas,

and no one on the bus has any news yet

about the body that washed up yesterday

on the rocks at the north side of the island.

Love is wide and small

There’s a jungle fungus

that invades the brains

of jungle ants,

turns’em into zombies.

But who loves ants?

Or fungus anywhere

when not in a sauce

or omelet. However,

when the magic ones,

the psilocybin mushrooms

invade our brains

they might lead us to God.

or loving ants, at least

enough to forgive them

when they invade

the bowl of sugar 

or the bag of dog food.