Marin Arts & Culture Premiere Issue April 2017 | Page 12

12 MARIN ARTS & CULTURE

  Out Park Presidio

 

 Evening soon will spill across the milkened sky.  I

pause, and take my coat, and leave to walk

out the city’s blocks and greens west along

long boulevards and streets, speaking but little

and soft, often mute,

listening intent to you who

    aren’t there,

   turn into avenues

of certain shadow, green or yellow avenues

that lead to Clement, or California Street

or, north from Lake Street into gray

vestiges of avenues that end

at the Presidio, or enter Seacliff and wend into

the road that winds through Lincoln Park and ends

at the Palace of the Legion of Honor

and Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker glistening

in the lifting mist.  Where is his

The Kiss?  

 

We walk on high

above the Golden Gate

       on the buckled ruins of the cliff road

to Land’s End and look to sea to see

what is never there, to see what millions,

maybe billions have stared to see looking

for what they also did not know.                            

 

Do we like the carlin wife of Usher’s Well

look for sons lost long ago at sea? 

Do we look for an empty bobbing dory,

or only for whatever

may not be there?

Spindrift

 

Moon abandons

its race against night

for the time.  It hides

behind the past storm,

below the stilled ridge,

beneath the unseen horizon. 

 

In darkened light I write you

something light again, something

witty, even

funny but all

 

earnest as death—every

labored line, every

wrested word,

every aching space.

The Earl of Los Angeles

    No man ever worked harder—and it sometimes comes to me now as a tragedy that he worked as he did for such ends.  He was worthy of greater causes.

 —Adela Rogers St. Johns, biographer of her father Earl Rogers, 1869-1922, whom Clarence Darrow called “the greatest jury lawyer of his time.”  

 

 My father’s father’s murderer was hanged

in 1918, the year of the end of the Great War,

that death sentence for seventeen million people. 

My father was five that year.

 

Your father would have gotten the  killer,

Schoon was the man’s name, acquitted I’m sure.

If not my father would have pardoned him.

 

Adela Rogers St. Johns, fifty years after

you wrote your father’s life, and death,

is fifty years after my father’s death. 

Re-reading your Final Verdict I remember 

stories my father told me of yours,

of your father’s defense of Darrow

when Darrow was charged with  jury bribery

as he defended the McNamara brothers

in the Los Angeles Times bombing case,

of his ringing defenses in the graft trials

in San Francisco in the years after

the 1906 earthquake and fire,

of his courtroom legerdemain, and fire,

his skullduggery.

 

Your father must have been among

the best of men.  Mine might have been as well,

as near as I could tell.  Like your father

mine was full of passionate intensity.  Yours--

is it true?— never lost a murder case

until his flamed life flickered.  Mine did,

though when asked about a verdict

often as not would respond with old

gallows humor—

 

— I won.

—The jury acquitted your client? 

 —No, they gave him life in prison.

 

 My father became an early public defender,

taking no fee for defending poor men charged

with murdering with dull knives and rusted pistols

or hands, to see they at least had a lawyer

if not justice, that a dark-skinned man

improbably wearing a starched white shirt,

charcoal suit and tie, counterfeit raiment

of  respectability, would take their frantic

early-morning telephone calls, ride out

for jailhouse visits, post gifts to children,

wire money and telegrams to wives

in Montgomery, Brownsville, Hermosillo

and Manila, strive, strain in the courtroom

with the fervor of your father for acquittal,

plead, when the jury had convicted

that they spare his client’s life, pray

when they declined, in the viewing room

in San Quentin, at the hour of execution. 

His grail was the abolition

of that other American barbarism,

     punishment by death.  

 

It is fifty years since my father died

for some same reasons your father died

the same age.  Nations take up arms still,

brandish torches of weaponry, march inexorable

bewildered pilgrims bound for Armageddon. 

Your father was indeed worthy of greater causes.

My father too perhaps, but he

would have been humbled just to be able

to carry your father’s valises and briefcases

to some courtroom of those causes, a

peace conference, or better a final

disarmament table.

Poems by John Briscoe

A poet’s vision