Haight Street

by Brett Rutherford

I sat up in the middle of the night, from a dream in which someone (not sure who) was telling me, "You have to revise 'City Limits' and republish it. It was the work that established you as a New York poet."

As you know, I obey my dreams. Indeed, when I arrived in New York City in 1969 as a 22-year-old and went to Emilie Glen's poetry salon to make my debut as a Greenwich Village poet, my portfolio was small indeed. And much of it was the first burst of poems I had written during my 1967 stay in San Francisco where I lived in the Haight Ashbury and wrote for an underground newspaper there.

By the end of October of that year, some city fathers decided they had had enough of the hippies, and I witnessed police officers beating people on the street. The first time I saw this, I was traumatized, and I need not say that my image of America was altered forever. A few weeks later, on Halloween night, I had a featured reading at the I and Thou coffeehouse on Haight Street, and in attendance was my best friend, Tom Fitzpatrick, who was leaving for Vietnam the next morning. We thought we would probably never meet again.

Two things happened that night that can never be forgotten. First, I was heckled in the middle of my reading by Charles Manson. Then, we were all trapped in the coffeehouse for several hours while the police outside were beating and arresting everyone who looked like a hippie.

I fled San Francisco shortly after that. It took two years for me to write a long poem combining the horrors of the events and the horrible irony of saying goodbye to your best friend because he is going off to fight for the country that wants you dead. (The happy outcome of that is that Fitzpatrick is still my friend, and he has visited me in every place I have lived over all these decades.)

The poem, "City Limits," is about 18 pages long, and finishing it in New York, it was my first "masterpiece" in the original sense of the word -- a work that one completes to prove mastery of one's art. Whenever I had featured readings I read it, and I am sure it overwhelmed audiences, even if the long rants within it, half Whitman and half Ginsberg, did not make a lot of sense. It's a windbag of a poem. But it really is how I got noticed in New York.

Today I have done the bidding of the Muses and I have revised it. It will go in my next book. I will share here just one section, where my 20-year-old self witnesses police violence:

2

HAIGHT STREET

I am watching
the long-haired boy and the
     guitarist on the doorstep.
The blue, club-laden police
     approach them.
One cop addresses them. The
     guitarist moves,
moves away into the crowd.

Then out of nowhere a raised arm.
The boy reels back under the club’s arc,
his raised hands locked in polished silver cuffs,
blood, great streams of it flow down his face--
one long uncomprehending fawn-like glance
     of horror buried as the club falls
his temple red and body trembling to the ground,
          the foot of the man
like some triumphant hunter posed, seeks the
               neck,
blood black like oil, dark in the streetlight.

The other bulwark of democracy drives back the
          screaming observers —
four girls are not spared his club.
After a while the hungry van arrives, they
     vanish
blue-black and burning eyes, crazed hunter
     dragging their prey,
they bag him for “resisting arrest.”

I stood witness and watched this happening.
Two hundred years of history collapsed.
My land, my Revolution, my salvador of centuries,
America I believed the only hope alternative,
inheritor of waning Europe’s blood and fears.
Is it come to this--that laughing ghouls
Like gorged priests and scheming despots
molest the least of your brethren for your
     greater glory?

O would there were god, Columbia,
and if that god looked over you,
     how I would pray to it tonight!

Do you think this is a small thing?
“Get over it,” I hear. “You lie,”
another says, “for your own politics.”
I could have touched that blood;
I could have tasted it. I could
have shouted and been beaten, too.