“Is it love to keep it from you?”

Severe angles make

light in San Francisco

incomparable, the light

steep as I climb horizontally,

tracking silver streetcar tracks.

It’s week 89 at the Golden Sardine &

about the same in years at Vesuvio,

whose patrons I read about as ripe

flowers watch my lips test

nectar as if it were poison.

All the places I chart here I’m

followed by this driverless car:

at Ocean Beach I hideaway, clean

like the half sand dollar in the tide;

in Berkeley I white-lie in grass

beneath the botanical building.

How does a driverless car matter

if our definitive, reunited hands?

I wake up deep in night certain

an earthquake is ending my life.