But what about the electric guitar? What if no walls
of amps warm & humming, no hand cradling strangely
tender feedback? My day begins in the dark,
coastline train-clatter, two more blocks of uncolored
pavement. Imagine life without it: days
like a sidewalk. Oh Richmond benzene, Richmond
mercury. How in a hundred you spent down for us
a hundred million summers. Your stills, your condensers.
Stove coils glowed on hills looking out on you, asphaltum,
grease, pale: words we didn’t want to know. Where salt water
marshes had rustled, ducks greened & speckled “in myriads,”
men sent from oil found abandoned ranches, a deep enough
bay, rails terminating. They zipped up your neck Richmond,
cast iron miles of pipe, mountains of copper for the three-
phasing current that your agitators might shake. Benzol,
zylol for dynamite. Highways unfurled, oceans overnighted,
from towers rippled wavelengths. New kinds of tones
blued off a Fender neck, fuzzed, trembled our car doors. Today
the 11th of February will be fifteen degrees
too warm. A train will go by where for a wage
I drag metal-clad cable into walls, airhorn drawing out
the bawl of progress. As it burns through you: swollen hulls
I always try not to see nesting at the shoreline north
of my life. Richmond polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
tucked into the wind, could I gauze what was missing
with headphones? Molecules catalytic-cracked to gasoline,
we drove away miles by the thousands, jetted them back.
Your tankers chuffed under the bridge. From your white-coated
work weeks sprang paraxylene for nylons, our skin was surprised,
phenol for glue to ply our plywoods. Houses sprawled,
you continued to do 300,000 barrels a day. Rivers
of kerosene to Bombay, Hanoi, nowhere too far. Oh city
that bore Standard Oil into the Pacific, tanker cars
clacked in before you had a city hall: Richemont,
by sword your name from a Norman hilltown to English castles
by gun to us. Every year a million pounds of heavy metals
into your air, onto Castro Cove’s sludge-bottom. Chevroned
gulls wheel in our choices. Their lack. In my ears,
notes a magnet drew from wires flumed like schools
of fish. Richmond how would we be without you,
our hospitals’ constant hum, shimmer of components spirited
from everywhere to our thumbs. On a carpet of carbon
flying. I stepped down from something diesel
to search bins for the sound of anger & queen jealousy, Bold
as Love, driven through tubing. Out of vinyl flaring, fingers
of Jimi Hendrix, about to swallow too much fire.