National Poetry Month Day 21: “Letters from Saint Francis” by Joshua Heineman
Letters from Saint Francis
Update Required
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
Flowers fill a wall three stories tall near the river, by the Parc du Champ de Mars
& I’m there, eyes wide, mouth sharp, in another year, long from now, far far from here
& old Paris seems so complete – so completely covered in concrete & meaning
I’m only bone-tired again, ready to be swallowed up by the din of Europe’s evening
Reborn as a Basque tour guide, or a pigeon on a park bench facing the seaside
… never leaving, my Mediterranean mothers & the gentle nudging of Italian weather.
Impressed by ordinary men less than humbled by the overwhelming obesity of time
Who go on, set apart from location, from station to station, & fashion some sort of home
In love like long rambling walks with no destination – Teach me that language
Run out my weakness on the roads of history stretched out to infinity & still arriving…
A thriving marriage of humanity & patience. Paris, I am there, unthinking.
Until a sober cathedral bell shakes me, reclaims me from a dumbstruck stupor
Here are the paved sand dunes of my poor California, America’s bold boutique future
Here are four hard years of my tracks, from hill to bay & back, from that Parisian wall of plants
& these nights – these nights lit like fires in the center of stars die out entirely. Morning in ruins, running
Two tickets to Istanbul & then the Serbian countryside & then… nothing.& finally, that life can still be like this.
-Joshua Heineman
Joshua Heineman is a writer and artist in San Francisco. ‘Reaching for the Out of Reach’ – his digital repurposing of historical stereographs – inspired a web app at the New York Public Library and was featured on NPR, The Atlantic and The New York Times. His work is collected at www.cursivebuildings.com.