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Wednesday
23rd July, 2008
New concerts announced!
Click HERE for details.
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A Thought for Today
Don't try to fast-forward your life, you'll get there soon
enough.
This
One Does It For Me!
Hello Ken,
I know Rod is famous for writing so lovingly about San Francisco and
that his "Stanyan Street" poem is justifiably famous.
I seem to remember, though, reading another poem with the name Stanyan
in the title but can't remember where or what it was about.
Can you help? Sorry to be so vague.
Vicki
As you so rightly say, Vicki, Rod has written a lot about San Francisco
and the Stanyan Street poem is but one set in this wonderful city.
Another poem with the word "Stanyan" in the title is "The Stanyan
Café" and this could be the
poem you're thinking of. It appeared in "Suspension Bridge" as well as
the Folio collection Rod published some years ago.
You'll find the poem below.
I hope this is the one you're looking for - if not, please let me know
and I'll do some more digging.
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McKUEN APPEARANCES
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Fantasies are free.
A good reputation is a heavy load to drag along, but a bad one
precedes you.
The sound that echoes must have that first initial strike.
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The Stanyan Café |
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I always knew
the old cafe
was made up just for us,
why else were our own memories
its only yellow pages ?
I heard somewhere or thought I heard
that it closed up,
changed hands, was leveled off
to be a piece of some great parcel
that contracts call development.
It drifted probably, shifted gears
or merely stopped.
The forward march leaves behind
the frame for picture postcards.
How could the corporate heart
be served
by flowers pressed in Camus’ book
or lacy vintage valentine ?
Someone said
the cafe turned into a cycle shop.
I don’t know.
It does roll on inside imagination,
perfect to the crumpled napkin
coffee ill-attended getting cold
the waiter growing old before our eyes.
The unimportant conversations
were always more important
than warmness on the inside trickling down
black coffee might provide.
And anyway the warmness up ahead was coming
and it was always better, best.
Suspense would always stop by for a chat.
More than just a part of love,
suspense is head foreplay.
I see it clearly now,
each day that dynamited into night
as though it were this night ahead.
And you,
a vapor all around me, in me.
I always thought the larger part
of heaven, hell or here
was the ambiance we carried to it.
Your breath is ever on me
and a little damp.
Perhaps some San Francisco mist collected
through the decades
and distilled,
waits here to fall when I come back.
So this is purgatory.
The memory set in mold.
Reality a little way past reach.
I wait.
Tomorrow then, or soon
you’ll reach and pull me up
and into heaven.
A bow has little competition
with an untied ribbon.
And bud before a flower opens
stays on stem unnoticed.
You cannot praise a bloom
beyond the blossom seen effectively.
As Steinian as that may be and is,
it’s also truth beyond all truths.
And our cafe, now vacant lot or worse,
is still and always Our Cafe,
waiting there for us to enter in
through hardly open, hard-to-open door.
- from Folio 51, Fall, 1985 |
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AND FINALLY
More next week. Meantime if you have a favorite McKuen song, poem or story
you'd like to share, or a question you need answered, drop me a line (you'll
find the address on our
Contact Page) and
I'll do the rest.-Ken,
Johannesburg, South Africa, July 23 |
| ©
1970, 1986, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 by Stanyan Music Group & Rod McKuen. All Rights Reserved |
