Private Eye
For some reason I think Ghirardelli Square is Aquatic Park
and walk to the end of Columbus one Sunday off. Pretty bad,
so it must have been a lot different when Spicer came here—
with his transistor and a young poet he wants to sleep with—
to bake off a hangover left from drinking and writing to dark.
All you see now is a brick mall full of tourists about to be had.
There’s the Bay, OK, but that’s the beach? Where’s one queer
to bring to life ghost stories so much better now than a myth?
Hard to imagine someone as real as Jack Spicer here for hours,
and so, after managing to avoid what’s happened to the place,
I head back to the Dante and another dinner of pork and beans.
But first I cross Broadway and, in City Lights, buy Flowers,
poems by George Stanley whose lines read like a small face
that starts to glow as this room darkens. Maria, in our teens.
-- Ron Horning
from the archive; first posted November 2, 2013. Photo above, left to right, Ron Horning, David Lehman, Steven Silberblatt, Jamie Katz.
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