Randall Mann was born in Provo, Utah. He currently lives in San Francisco and is the author of Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago, 2009), Complaint in the Garden (Zoo Press, 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry, and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (7th ed. Pearson Longman, 2007).
EARLY MORNING ON MARKET STREET
The moon, once full, is snow.
The line of transplanted trees,
thin and bloodless. The pink neon
bakery sign, Sweet Inspiration,
a mockery of loneliness—
but no one cares to eat, we souls
of this hour jacked up on what-
ever. And though desire
else to call the idling car, its passenger door
pushed open; or the shirtless man—
he must be mad, tweaked out on speed—
outside his door
at Beck's Motor Lodge, staring
for hunger or mercy. Or me,
rubbing dirt from my eyes, wanting,
again, a man I do not want.
THE MORTICIAN IN SAN FRANCISCO
This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
was made monument—no, myth—by the years
since he was shot.
I remember when Harvey was shot:
twenty, and I knew I was queer.
Those were the years,
Levi's and leather jackets holding hands
on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk—
elected on the same day as Dan White.
I often wonder about Supervisor White,
who fatally shot
Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk,
who was one of us, a Castro queer.
May 21, 1979: a jury hands
down the sentence, seven years—
in truth, five years—
for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White,
for the blood on his hands;
when he confessed that he had shot
the mayor and the queer,
a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?
Why cry over spilled milk,
some wondered, semi-privately, for years—
it meant "one less queer."
The jurors turned to White.
If just the mayor had been shot,
Dan might have had trouble on his hands—
but the twelve who held his life in their hands
maybe didn't mind the death of Harvey Milk;
maybe, the second murder offered him a shot
at serving only a few years.
In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White.
And he was made presentable by a queer.
THE END OF LANDSCAPE
There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,
Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—
an obsession: I wanted to live in it.
(One professor in exile did,
covered himself in the stuff as a joke—
then spent a week removing mites.) That's
enough. The fields of rushes lay filled
with water, and I said farewell,
my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,
gone to another coast, another peninsula,
one without sleep or amphibious music.
Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—
because everything is truer at a remove—
I watch the man I love watch
the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,
lit city of legislation and flat land.
I think of Florida, how flat.
I think of forgetting Florida.
And then the landscape grows black.