Poetry Is Where You Find It Xii Poem by Frank Avon

first lines in a collection by Garrett Hongo, 'The River of Heaven'

In California, north of the Golden Gate
clumps of spinach gritty with sand in the seaside lot
orders from uncles and telephones full of questions
I'm back near the plantation lands of cane and mule trails

Driving off the Kam Highway along the North Shore,
I must have always wanted to go it alone
We woke near midnight / flicking on the coat closet's bulb
from under the harpstring shade of tree ferns

... - a Thirties blue Fedora / slouching through thick China fog
There's a swale of new fieldgrass / rainsprung
At the No.1 Cafe, waiting for his lunch
Across the vacant lot and its small garden

When I lived in Seattle, I loved to watch / the Sonics
In high school I was in a special group
Sheathed in a lucent, sky-blue Spandex suit, she reclines
In a back alley, on the cracked pavement, with the strewn waste

I fling back the white-washed, garagelike door /
of the ghetto church
Under the cone of flurred light / blued with cigarette smoke
In Chicago, it is snowing softly....

There are things tonight I've never known
In winter, those first mornings after my father died
I have no memories or photograph of my father
He must have come wanting little, / except to belong to the land