We know some things, man, about some things, Bob Kaufman said, strutting down another San Francisco street on his way from there to whatever’s here. His pockets were turned out to their linty parts like a magician’s mid-trick. He had a dull pencil tucked between his ear & his preternatural Afro. I followed, up roller-coaster hills, past misbegotten alley kisses, hummingbirds everywhere hitchhike-thumbing California’s daylight. Bob Kaufman loved San Francisco’s gentle malaise, long views of bay & insistent bridge, the ocean right after. I’m from Indiana, where dirt roads lead to other dirt roads that always lead to fields of blondly tasselled stalks wafted by local infidelities. When the wind kicks up, crops stammer secrets recklessly as the gnats cloud in buggy doubts above those lazy farmers in repose. Just like the poets in San Francisco— chez lounging-it in silk kimonos for their gorgeous, sun-slicked photos. Everyone stays skyward out here. Just then, Bob Kaufman turned a corner in his own quick reverie & started up & down the coronary hills of a city everyone talks about but nobody can afford to love. Not like my home town of Indianapolis, where four skyscrapers stand affordably in the center of your wallet’s imagination. They subsidize everybody’s big ideas while the penthouse couple fishes for a third for their kinky party. There’s even a cuck chair in their bedroom where the husband watches his wife being ravished. Indy can be just as fantastic & horny as San Francisco or Paris at times. For a time, Bob Kaufman was the most famous poet in France—bigger than Verlaine or the pirate Rimbaud. But in San Francisco, during his ten years of silence, he was wrong-eyed & woebegone. He stayed silent & alone as if not naming the words ricocheting in his ears could sustain him while passersby side-eyed him up & down—his hobo couture, street sleeping, all those paper-bag manifestos.

This is drawn from “Be Easy: New and Selected Poems.”