In any regard, I find it sad that this poem might not otherwise exist were I not to transcribe it here. I would imagine that he himself has a copy, though finding him and coerscing him to perform it might be more trouble than most people need. I think its a wonderful poem and so have transcribed it as best as my ear and dictating style permit from the MP3 copy. I feel rather icky about the unauthorized reproduction of this poem but feel a bit compelled to preserve it as an archivist, so...]

Sacramento
Shimmering leaves today
and hot still air tomorrow.

First rains
that bring messages
in the ionic air
and overflow storm drains
and finally the all-day fog
that settles like a conspiracy of obscurity.
Makes the the artists and the housewives stir crazy,
prone to fits of inspiration.

Then comes the oppressive heat of summer.
It gets so hot in this valley,
it makes the machines break down;
lighbulbs burn out,
locks break,
auto-electrical systems just freeze up.

There are at least two things you need to know about this city:
It shimmers and sprawls at the junction of two mighty rivers in an unnatural valley.
This is serious --
I read about it in a John McPhee book.
Most valleys were made by glaciers and erosion.
This valley was created over the eons
of geologic time
by the teutonic upthrust
of the coastal range to the west
and the Sierra to the east.

The other thing you need to know is this:
There is a hidden brand of philosophy that considers the influence of a name
on a place and the inevitable arising of a name from a place.
Sometimes
the spirit of this valley is sinister
but its always seductive.
And sometimes
its the very definition of a spiritual plexus.

Joan Didion added another element to this valley's biography
when she spoke of her family's
obsession
with land ownership,
real estate
and the recording of grants and deeds.

But lets get back to this sinister element.
I mean, I'm not trying to scare you or anything
I just want you to put your ears to the hot pavement
and you will hear the voices of ghosts
praying beneath the waters
of a flood
we stole from them
with the building of the levees
on the backs of the Chinese laborers,
the stolen freedom of each year's swollen rivers
that deposited seeds and silt
for the animals and the indigenous.

And then were that fellow named
Sutter.
I know he's supposed to be an honorary figure in this town,
I know that parks and hospitals are named after him --
Tim Holt even named a newspaper after him.
It was called the Suttertown News
and its motto came from Shakespeare:
"Tell the truth and shame the devil."
That's why we need to let everyone know
that John Sutter was a rapist
who held young Indian maidens
as sex slaves
inside Sutter's Fort.

But I'm not trying to depress you or bring you down.
You just have to realize
that the spirit of this place is permanent.
The definition of poetry
is continuously being redefined
in the ongoing marriage of two rivers.

And you just have to put your
ear to the ground to hear the voices of the saddest souls,
the damaged seeds
that go walking
like apparitions through the dark, foggy nights.

Seeds like Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good, members of the Family
who moved into the small studio attic near 17th and P streets in midtown.
They wanted to be close to Charlie
who sat strumming his guitar
in a Folsom prison cell
and kept their grandmothery landlady in the dark by stealing her copies of the Sacramento Bee off the front porch whenever their own names showed up in the front page headlines.

And speaking of grandmothery landladies, the underground roots of the yard at 14th and F streets
still mourn the loss of the bones
lowered into the holes
by Dorthea Puente.
"Where did you take our lady of the night?" ask the decaying leaves
and the ghosts of the lonely old borders still heave and cough
as they drink their hidden posions.
And if you put your ear to the pavement
near that house of death
you can those men quoting TS Eliott:
"There I saw one I knew and stopped him crying,
'Stetson, that corpse you planted last year in your yard --
has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year
or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh, keep the dog keep far hence that is the friend of men
Or with nails he'll dig it up again.'"

But I'm not trying to be morbid or gruesome.
Its just my obligation to ghost of history.
Some, like Patty Hearst, are still alive.
Heiress of a media monster become Tanya in a new life
Gun-toting terrorist
for the Symbonese Liberation Army
caught in that famous front-page frame
by a hidden camera
of a Carmichael bank
then hid out under a different identity
in a suburban home
of this same valley
admist the unmindful middle class.

And the terrorists
of more recent age walked these streets too.
They called him the UNABOMBER.
I mean, he sat in our libraries
studying lists of lobbyists in a dusty reference book
until he found the one
that identified the man
who symbolized to him
the incarnated evil of capitalism's criminality
and then delivered the deadly package to the red brick
office building
at 13th and I
streets.
Just a few blocks away from where Dorthea mixed her deadly potions.
Just a few blocks away from that spot on the Capitol grounds where Squeaky
tried to pull the trigger
on a strolling
President
Gerald
Ford.

Then there's the history of agriculture in this fertile valley
and the back-breaking labor of the Mexican farmworkers
who still honor their hero Ceasar Chavez.

And the ghosts of the Chinese laborers still sing their Buddhist songs.
And the ghosts of the Maidu still sing their spirit songs
and dance the Big Head
on the hard-packed dirt floors
of smoking roundhouses.

But I'm not trying to bore you
with the facts of history.
I just want you to understand
the evolution
of a young city.
I'm not trying to belabor the point,
I just want to give you the images
through the lenses
of the image makers
who give us this city in a sort of visual sacrament:
Lights of the adolescent skyscrapers,
Prayers of the wandering homeless,
The serving of coffee.
A million keys waiting for the expected locks
and the prisoners who wait for the keys
to unlock their prison cells.
The trains,
swimming pools,
golf courses,
artists and preachers,
aircraft hangars,
automobiles,
and acoustic nights.
But I'm not trying to be multitudinous.

There is a saying about this city:
many who come here
come
for deeply hidden spiritual reasons.
Reasons
only understood by the understanding of shadows.
The ones who come
are often planning to leave,
held back
by their own ambivalence.

The ones who leave
always come back for reasons
as mysterious as the dark waters
of the two rivers.

But I'm not trying to be mysterious --
I'm just trying to speak
in the tongues of the sacrament.






* -- I know its probably "tectonic", but that's what he said, man...