Views
Our rooftop views are just landscape
and photo opportunity to them—
glittering Bay Bridge at night,
grey-white sheen of Coit and Transamerica
by day, the shimmer off the water behind cascades
of matching blonde hair on the heads
of our three tourist friends, snapping
with phone cameras a constant stream of pics
to update quickly to Facebook.
They love the white sailboats drifting
and lazy on the gorgeous bay,
my hometown built up
to its layers of Victorian stateliness
and urban glamour, new glass
skyscraper condos gleaming
their bluegreen silhouettes. I love
to hate these new buildings, out-of-
proportion to this water-hemmed city
of small-scale density. From this
rickety roof deck, I can track
the steeple of St. Peter & Paul’s, there,
two blocks up that hill, one over, and I see
the bed where first Yeyeh died,
then Mamah, years later, just last year,
just now I miss her, and everyone
else this city holds. What is it
to be from a place? Why nostalgia
for a place that is still my place?
Nostalgia seems indulgent,
even in this glittering light.
The visitors are smiling, laughing,
deleting what is unflattering
from the photo stream. Just before
they came, I had to take time to replace
old pictures on our walls. One is here
because she’s been left again, by the woman
we were all sure was the one this time
around. No trace of her, the one who was not
the one, in the myriad of smiling faces
that hang near the bed I share with Sandy.
These friends are Sandy’s friends, really,
not mine, and they are here not to relive
old heartbreaks, looking to get away
to the end of the earth, make new memories
against the Pacific’s crush. Here, here, get one
with the waves. I comply, remember
leafing through those old photos. I found more
of myself even younger, dressed-up,
with friends I don’t see anymore.
The waves roll at Ocean Beach, the wind
whips blonde hair across every frame,
impossible to get a good shot.
People change, I tell myself.
People want new things, should be allowed
to start fresh. On our rides through town
Sandy drives; I am our guide:
historical descriptions, landmarks,
intricacies of who lived here first,
who displaced, aftereffects
of the Quake, the War,
Internment or the Great Migration.
This is the part I love, telling
and retelling what makes this place.
The visitors notice most
the number of luxury cars.
I’m looking up to take in the sheer walls
of shiny new blue glass, the crush of sky
reflected in near-sky, but they
are busy counting BMWs.
If there were an earthquake,
the ground downtown would be buried
in four feet of broken glass.
Who knows where I heard this. I revel
in it, the long moment
after the sucking in of breath,
what I know is fear.
Maybe I am meaner than I’d like
to admit, a little bitter at the way
my city is changing. My city, I call it,
as if it knows who I am in the churn
of its reinvention. Sandy tells them
the buildings are designed for earthquake safety.
Tanks of water at the tops, water I’ll imagine
as Caribbean blue like their glass
externalities, sulfurous, rocking
when the quake comes, shifting
like the city. I used to teach a unit
on earthquake safety in Geography classes.
I recall the brochures with maps of the city
I taught my boys to read: here, sand and gravel;
here, mud; here, bedrock. What if the whole city
shakes down from its own weight?
The bedrock is what stays.
The sand and gravel is what ripples
like another wave back toward its ocean.
There’s more than one wave
coming over this city. How to tell it?
The words rush angry out of my mouth
as I name seismic shifts—
Bayview, Mission, hipsters, Tenderloin
Tech 2.0, that waving word: gentrification. I know
no one wants a lecture on race
in this white city. The visitors are teachers, too.
This is the place they come to release
that pressure valve I can’t seem to find.
To see this expanse of cold ocean.
Eat local, shop Chinatown, count
luxury cars. In the end, it’s me who is exhausted.
When the quake comes, may it shatter down
like blue glitter confetti falling
from the Sunday night stage
at Trannyshack. Let that glass cascade,
rain down with my imagined water,
pierce the sky-light with its shards.
Let it shake me wholly, to my very core,
or not at all.