Monday's Poetry: "Stanyan Street"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

Last week I commented on two poets, Sylvia Plath and Charles Bukowski, who are favorites of my grandson, Boone, a junior in college, and I featured a poem by Mr. Bukowski.  That got me to thinking about my favorite poet during the time that I was in college.

Rod McKuen was one of the better known poets associated with the tumultuous decade of the 1960's, and his poetry and songs were favorites of many college students during those years.  I have several volumes of McKuen's poetry, two of which - Listen to the Warm and Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows - have been on my personal bookshelf since they were first published more than half-a-century ago.

In the title piece for the second volume, "Stanyan Street," the poet relates an aging relationship to an aging neighborhood, and he focuses on a former love and a former apartment that all came together on Stanyan Street.

Stanyan Street is an actual location in San Francisco.  It runs in a north-south direction and forms the eastern side of Golden Gate Park.  McKuen and a lady friend apparently lived on Stanyan Street sometime in the mid-twentieth century.

Yesterday in this space I discussed the complicated estate of my g-g-granduncle, William C. Smith of Seneca, Missouri.  William had a total of fifty-three heirs, and for the past couple of years I have been trying to track those fifty-three individuals through the public records.

Lola Burkhart, one of the fifty-three heirs, was almost twenty-three-years-old when her grand-uncle, William C. Smith, died in February of 1920.   Actually, at the time of William's death Lola was the young bride of Carl A. Schilling, and the couple was at home at 1126 Stanyan Street, in San Francisco, California, and they continued to live there until 1926.  Lola died in 1992 and is buried in San Mateo, California.

Here then, for any descendants of Lola Burkhart Schilling, is a tribute - of sorts - to the street where she and Carl began their marriage, a tribute penned by a poet who lived and loved on that same street several decades later and went on to become one of the preeminent voices of the 1960's.


Stanyan Street
by Rod McKuen

1 

You lie bent up in embryo sleep
below the painting of the blue fisherman
                             without a pillow.
The checkered cover kicked and tangled on the
      floor
the old house creaking now
a car going by
the wind
a fire engine up the hill.

I've disentangled myself from you
                            moved silently,
groping in the dark for cigarettes,
and now three cigarettes later
                               still elated
                                      still afraid
I sit across the room watching you -
the light from the street lamp coming through the
       shutters
hysterical patterns flash on the wall sometimes
                  when a car goes by
otherwise there is no change.
Not in the way you lie curled up.
Not in the sounds that never come from you.
Not in the discontent I feel.

You've filled completely
this first November day
with Sausalito and sign language
                            canoe and coffee
                              ice cream and your wide eyes.
And now unable to sleep
because the day is finally going home
because your sleep has locked me out
I watch you and wonder at you.

I know your face by touch when it's dark
I know the profile of your sleeping face
the sound of you sleeping.

Sometimes I think you were all sound
kicking free of covers
and adjusting shutters
moving about in the bathroom
          taking twenty minutes of our precious time.

I know the hills
         and gullys of your body
                   the curves
                             the turns.

I have total recall of you
and Stanyan Street
because I know it will be important later.

It's quiet now.
Only the clock,
moving toward rejection tomorrow
breaks the stillness.

2

I have come as far away
as means and mind will take me
trying to forget you.
I have traveled, toured
turned a hundred times in the road
hoping to see you rushing after me.

At night,
though half a world away,
I still hear you sigh in several sizes.
The breathing softer when you're satisfied.
The plip-plop body machinery back to normal.
remembering how warm you are
and how defenseless in your sleep
never fails to make me cry.
I cannot bear the thought of you
in someone else's arms
yet imagining you alone is sad.

And in the day
my mind still rides the bridge
from Sausalito home.
I do not think
me and San Francisco
will be friends again
we share too many troubles.
Stanyan Street and other sorrows.

3

We try so hard to make each other frown
I sometimes wonder
if we haven't been together much too long.
The words that work the wonders are so few
that they seem foolish anymore.

Is this a kind of loving too,
a chocolate bar that tastes good at the time
but kills the dinner later on ?
Could be our appetite will go
till even memory's not a feast.

But there are times
when you can smile in such a way
that I'd forget a ten year war
and lie down in your shadows' shadow
and live on sounds your stomach makes.
In these brief times
I could die against your side
and never make a warning sound
content to suffocate
within the circle of your back.

  

4

Three years
              ( or maybe four )
have moved beneath the San Francisco wreckers
and their yard-long hammers.
Their caterpillar treads that transform brick
to dust-red powder.
Those giant cranes
that slice a roof down
with a single swing.

Some have never known the wreckers' rattle.
Those houses on Pacific that march toward 
       posterity
restored by dilettantes from Jackson Square
painted up like aging actresses
with eye-shadow windows and rouge-red doors.
Some have had collections taken up
petitions passed from hand to hand.
Their widows walks scraped free of dirt
and green grass planted where the weeds once grew.

These houses almost shiny new
that crowd Nob Hill
and marched down Lombard in a row
were saved to show the glory of the past.

There was a house on Stanyan street
that took a single day to wreck
    and that includes an hour spent
at tin-pail lunch on sandwiches and beer.

They carted off the timber and sold it by the pound.
The bricks at least, ten cents a piece,
now make a Marin garden wall.

But there is little salvage to be had
in bent and broken nails
and things that might have been
if I'd had wiser eyes
or been a fisherman
                   in blue.