Miserable day in cold San Francisco, color bleeding from skin, cloth, trees. I pass streets slimy with dogshit . . . or crusted white with birdshit, right under the eaves where the pigeons roost. Night's a blackness that does not glint. Its inhabitants are not; they occupy, and briefly: bums rustling under blanket, an old man carting his oxygen tank slowly, and later, a woman whose head is tilted back, garbed in a filthy hot pink jogging suit that is too tight for her; she is looking up at the sky, and I wonder, Is she looking for her stars?




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