Bobby Bradshaw, Poet

Franz Kafka's Letter To His Father

Remember when I was your son?
You would pass in the hallway
and your sneer would be a stiff arm
which shoved me against
the wall. I longed to disappear.
Instead my failure
stood out like a grotesque tattoo
which you refused to ignore.
I didn't have the courage to leave.
The truth was, I was like one of those birds
in the Frankfurt zoo. Their glass pane
long ago removed, they still
didn't have the courage
to fly through the framed

air.

San Francisco

1945

Maybe it was the adrenalin of flag waving.
But when he walked into that room,
the dance floor as crowded as martinis
on a tray, I saw
him. Like spies we traded notes,
our friends running them back and forth
like couriers with news
from the front.
Would I dance with him?
No, would I marry
him?
It was crazy.
I felt like a sixteen year old beauty queen
on her first
float.
Maybe I should have felt insulted.
Impulsive buying, my mom said.
But I felt beautiful.
And he was more beautiful than any flag.
Buoyed
with love, we married
a month later
on the stage of the bandstand
in Golden Gate Park.
Thirty years later
we'd still be trading
notes.

1946

My baby rubbed
her heels on my belly.
We lived in a curved
space. I'd whisper
back to her,
giving her the world's
news.
Daddy had a promotion.
The bees were wearing
yellow trousers.
Daddy was winking
at her.
The horses were clattering
up and down Market Street.
A dragon was roaming
Chinatown.
Firecrackers were going off
at peoples' feet.
The funny Lion dancers shook
as if infested with lice.
Evil spirits had been driven off.
It was a lucky
year.

1964

A young man lifted
the veil from my daughter's face.
A murmur broke through the room
like incoming surf.
The room blurred.
Tears leaked
from my rust-red eyes
all afternoon.
My husband joked about renting
my daughter's old room out. My stare
vetoed that
idea.

1996

My daughter and her husband
want me to move to Pleasanton
with them.
I have no history
there, I argue.
I'd rather have tort lawyers
lined up at my door
like the destitute
queued up at Saint Anthony's kitchen
than to move
from San Francisco.
It's dirty,
they say. "Yes?"
I ask.
And there's crime,
they argue.
"Oh?"
We'll discuss this
another time, they say,
as if I lived
in a county without running water,
without indoor toilets.
Yes, I say, another
time.

The Beatles. I Couldn't Hear Their Lyrics But

it didn't matter. All the girls
knew the words more intimately
than they knew their periods.
I kept waiting for the thing

to end, my date's perfume thicker
than Daly City's fog. I leaned
against her. My hand measured
her waist. PAUL, she screamed.

A man inside a gorilla suit
had a better chance than I had.
How could a boy with pimples,
his face greased like a mime's,

cuddle up with Brenda? Sweet
scents clung to my grungy shirt.
Girls were more mysterious
than geometry, with better angles.

I was confused, but motivated.

I vowed I'd learn to play guitar.
It was that or become a mime.
I'd stand on stage, bobbing
my head like a pigeon's,

singing into a high voltage mike.
Why should I be denied
some dignity? For now
I smiled, weaving to the music,

as if mastering tai chi. A
slow contortion, an effort
to be hip, as Brenda wrapped
her arms across her chest.

Tag Team Wrestling

I am resigned to the conflict.
Isn't evil always masked?
Shouldn't that well-lit mat
be roped off like some museum piece
of a more innocent era?
But when I think of my youth
I think of Russians swaggering in
glazed in oil, their backs shining
under the loud lights.

I think of the Dee-troit Bomber
and some well-scrubbed rookie
taking them on. American flags
were waved. Bleachers stomped.

But within minutes the Russians
had worked the illegal pile driver
and Dee-troit was so bloodied
his chest looked like a butcher's floor.
But he refused to give in.
He spit at the masked face,
his own cheeks swollen, big as fists.

But the chickenshit ref gave it away
as the Russian's pal jumped in
untagged to tomahawk Dee-troit
from behind. And Dee-troit's eyes
so bloodied he tagged one
of the Russians. We stood up
yelling, mad as hell. Patriotism.

Youth.

Woody Guthrie. The Dust Bowl Ballads

The 30s have been as vivid to me
as an old neighborhood.
And not because of stats
compiled by government agencies.
Because Woody sang
of farmers, who watched
as the soil flew off
in gusts.
Inevitably
a cloud of dust
would settle like a dark
fog. Children might wake to a foot of soil
on their chests, having slept
through the storm
like potatoes.

Wells in Oklahoma were empty buckets.
The dogs so skinny in Texas
their fleas long ago
abandoned them and headed
west.
Woody watched as families
steered westward in cranky cars
till they broke down
in California.

But no one had the Do-re-mi.
Vigilantes rousted them from jungle camps.
Cops prodded them with sticks
to keep them moving. They moved
as often as the soil did
back home. They drifted from orchard
to orchard chasing after a job.
But too often they were like cows
chasing a crow. Their baggage
sinking lower, they moved
on.

But nothing was worse
than those greasy black storms
Woody remembers heaving
against their fences,
whistling through their shacks
till their lungs blackened.
Like trapped miners
reminiscing on sunlight,
Woody's folks could remember good times.
They kept their humor, too.
Woody's gal, I remember, was buried
so deep by a dust storm
he said they used a steamshovel
to "dig his darlin'

out."

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