Montgomery Street Cleaning

The German poet, bartender, magician, wanderer, playwright, refugee, and performer

who was Exiled in Vienna

arrived at the States United in 1933.

Uniting people was a thing in the thirties.

She had drive. She was a hitchhiker. It took her places

she had never been before.

In 1952 she stopped.

In 1952 she stayed around

because of the fog.

Because of the fog, she left

no more. Set up a shop with no-where’s to sell

on Montgomery Street,

1010 or in the closet -1014

in North Beach on the hills of San Francisco

where All the artists cranked

Out-

Work-

Inspiration

with little more than smoke and mirrors

they beat the Underdogs.

Panned dirt. Found gold. 

The difference between street level lingo

and horned poetic motifs.

Looking back now about it All,

she said the shower was the best, it was

on the roof.  After a rowdy, stinky night

she would disrobe in the Pacific Bay air

and sacrifice her body to hot beads

pelting her thick Austrian skin under New York neon gas,

atop sirens and broken glasses rolling below.

The steam from her body mixed with the fog in the air 

exchanged vows, made love to each other there 

with ruth standing in the middle in

all lower cases, cleansed.

She rose above the ruth-less-ness of it All

below her. She sticks out her thumb, finally

making the last word a gesture 

of straighter lines and mist ends.

She looks a head, she looks be hind and she finds All is again

circularity, repetition, rhythm,

and heart beats bumming free rides to the top. 

Image credit By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

Text after image:

"The bench to remember George Sterling is on a San Francisco hill that commands the Golden Gate Sterling: Tribute By Idwal Jones(S. F. Examiner, November 18, 1926) GEORGE STERLING, touching on his fifty-seventh year, and feeling wearied turned his face to the wall and died. He quitted this life from his little room in the Bohemian Club, and with no more regret than a bird quitting a twig. This was somewhere between 7 o’clock of Tuesday night and noon yesterday. No mat-ter when. For the curtain had fallen on the drama of San Francisco’s Bohemia in which he had been master of revelry for two golden and charming decades. The Dionysian had drunk the cup to the lees, and found the end of life bitter. The reason for living was past finding out. He said good-by to no one. To say good-by would have caused his friends grief. They are many, and they all wept, for he was an exquisite poet, and a charming and loyal friend. I last saw him two weeks ago. We had walked arm in arm through dense fog at midnight, and we..."