Where I Used to Live

Here are words that I wrote while I was living there (before my final landlords went crazy and I was afraid to stay any longer), and a primitive photograph I took long ago that shows a portion of





The View From My Back Window, While I Was Living
On Rhode Island Street, Between 25th and 26th Streets,
San Francisco





I have watched a thousand sunsets flutter behind The Breasts
of San Francisco that the white invaders renamed Twin Peaks,
incising them with spiral roads. Near them is the radio tower
I call Galacta. A lovely female automaton, she constructed
herself without warning, almost overnight; stood up quickly,
legs firmly planted, rubies flashing at neck, ankles, and waist –
triumphant child of the powers that control communication
who concealed her hasty erection until it was too late
to object. She arrived quickly, but she will stay for a while.

What else I see from my back window changes very little, but
is the perfect theater for light as it changes hour by hour.
Below, the breathy freeway river surges around Potrero Hill;
this side of the traffic are giant letters atop a billboard
that the drivers see one way, but I read as the magic word,
ATOYOT. I see in the backyard just below my rear window,
the inner world of my dying landlord's garden. His life
is a meditative practice of carrying rocks and moving plants,
creating a maze of steps and terraces and quiet places to sit.
A child's horse rocker with battered paint is suspended
on wires from a twisted pine; the toy horse gallops
in the wind, plunging back and forth above a marble bench
that is backed with thick jasmine climbing up the pine.
Sometimes I go down to sit among the white stars of the
blossoms, in a dream-inducing odor strong as ripe bananas.

- James Eilers, copyright 2006

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