"Private detective" [by Ron Horning]

Private detective

For some reason I think Ghirardelli Square is an aquatic park

and walk to the end of Columbus on a free Sunday. pretty bad,

so it must have been very different when Spicer came here –

with his transistor and a young poet he wants to sleep with –

to bake a hangover left over from drinking and writing in the dark.

All you see now is a brick mall full of tourists.

There’s the bay, ok, but is that the beach? where is queer

Bringing ghost stories to life so much better than a myth now?

It’s hard to spend hours imagining someone as real as Jack Spicer,

and after we managed to avoid what happened to the place,

I go back to the Dante and another pork and bean dinner.

But first I cross Broadway and buy flowers in City Lights,

Poems by George Stanley, the lines of which read like a little face

that begins to glow as that space darkens. Maria, in our teenage years.

– Ron Horning

from the archive; first posted November 2, 2013. Photo above, left to right, Ron Horning, David Lehman, Steven Silberblatt, Jamie Katz.