There is no guarantee of justice except the personality of the judge.—Eugen Ehrlich (1917)
But who’s the judge?
Where was he born?
What the pleasure to conform?
No guarantee, but your nudge,
suffices if it’s nolens volens I,
whom the legislature's norm
advances to articulate a lie.
What price, then, personality?
for William Harvey Ryan
“Bill Ryan, whose Contact magazine attracted international attention in the ‘60s, drove his car over a cliff nr. Stinson Beach and was found only last wkend. A longtime emphysema sufferer, he had just enough strength left to end it all . . . “
--Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, October 22, 1986
Indestructible Bill Ryan, now destroyed.
“Who’s the best American poet today?
you asked. And when I said Lowell,
you were incredulous: “Jesus, Lowell!”
Supper on Stockton Street,
then off to Ginsburg’s Irish Pub.
Why on earth did we argue about
Dobermans and fire engines?
At some point Herb showed up.
The San Francisco Fault,
Esquire, then Swank . . .
Well, a good time was had
you drank your way down
“Hikers found the
flamboyant editor’s Cadillac
at the bottom of a 200-foot cliff
off Highway 1 . . . ”
The mind wanders:
I think for some reason
of Keats and Hunt
Sitting in the garden
in the Vale of Health,
writing sonnets. Getting drunk.
Note: The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen died of inoperable lung cancer on February 1, 1997.
Updated: Apr 24, 2023
You’re green now, tree,
you’re green, and leaves
will cover your wound;
that broken branch will fall
eventually, storm-slashed
off, now strung upside down,
hooked onto a sibling
adjacent sturdy limb.
Just as we, too, deep now
in this bright darkling wood,
dispute the selva oscura to be
and the future fractal fall.
April 15, 2022
A subsequent version of this poem was published in the New English Review in June 2022.
