Summer in San Francisco. We will continually complain about the weather, the lack of sun and the milky sky. Autumn’s when the days are really perfect here, so we look forward to October’s heat wave, to Mama Nature’s confetti, with a poem by Lew Welch from Ring of Bone.
“This bright-eyed bardic spirit,” writes Gary Snyder, in the book’s foreword, “Lew Welch, still wandering and singing on the back roads… will be with us a long time.” To celebrate this new edition, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Tom Killion, and a few surprise guests will be in town this Thursday. Join us at the SF library.
And now onto dreaming of that fiery haze of fall (in the summer)…
THE IMPORTANCE OF AUTUMN when that autumnal wind busy with the rubbish of a year divests the tree of lingering ornaments sending them whirling with the fallen ones when that consumptive flush that culmination pretense fragmentation reveals a tree of sticks that cannot cage the wind and ducks pass black and low in a sky of so intense a glare that gulls seem gray then look closely for in this primal light you’ll see love walking with the wind pressed to her thighs you’ll see her as she dances dancing counter to the whirling leaves you’ll see her dance ‘til suddenly she stops quieting the leaves some settle on her breast and hair one floats by — she hits it with her hand and vanishes then on a field of dark pine trees burst flocks of gulls white [1949-50]
