Letter from San Francisco, by Julie Bruck

Sunset Streets, by Wayne Thiebaud (USA) 1985

Letter from San Francisco

​for Wayne Thiebaud at 100
 
A small red car turns onto Eureka, 
the climb so steep, so narrow, trees form 
a canopy of green. Unless the tarmac 
is magnetized, there should be no hope
for that sporty red coupe, nor for the moving 
van approaching the top, which appears to lose 
heart, makes a left before the hill’s summit.
A few brave cars do beetle down this way,
plus a speck of a motorcyclist, like a fly.
Who else could have invented these streets?
I'm afraid the next time I hear your name
it will be because you've died, so I'm writing
to say that your vision still holds here:
White metal sky, another dot pushing
its tiny stroller diagonally across 19th.
This whole, delicately balanced universe 
ought, according to the laws of physics,
simply tumble and roll. It’s why I praise,
though I hesitate to say, your outdated
trust in the world to hold itself together,
sheer joyful unlikelihood of the next car, 
headlights on in daylight, hurtling this way
and managing to stick to the vertical grade 
that should (says the eye), launch it into space.
But it slows at the bottom, stops to drop
someone off at the Civil Rights Academy,
and continues. School Crossing says a sign. 
Friday Street Cleaning says another, as one 
more Tinker Toy crests the hill and creeps back
down, under knitted phone and electric lines 
which traverse the street in all directions, this
cat's cradle which somehow brings the power 
in and out, at least, most of the time. 
                                                                 Paint.
May power still surge through your brush,
flattening the city, then tilting it up again.
You make the rest of us want to stay vertical, 
to peer over edges, to hold on for dear life.
The hills grow steeper every year.
 
Julie Bruck

Julie Bruck is a Canadian poet who lives in San Francisco—a hill city that Wayne Thiebaud’s streetscapes keep teaching her to see afresh. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Walrus, Poetry Daily, and The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, among other venues. Her third book, Monkey Ranch (Brick Books), won Canada’s 2012  Governor General's Literary Award, and How to Avoid Huge Ships was a finalist for the same award in 2019. “Letter from San Francisco” comes from a new book manuscript, We Love You Get Up. www.juliebruck.com