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