A friend came to fetch me today when I finished work at the library and we made use of the spectacular clearness of the cold afternoon to take a long conversational walk in Golden Gate Park.
"Why is that serpent attacking that mountain lion in that fountain?" my friend asked.
"Golly," I said. "I think that was just the fashionable sort of thing they were carving back around 1910."
"Yes," my friend agreed. "You can tell it wasn't done recently."
"Nature is no longer red in tooth and claw like it used to be," I remarked.
And lucky for Beethoven, we further agreed, that he got his memorial equally long ago. How curious and wonderful it seems now to contemplate our San Francisco ancestors busily filling the park with this and countless similar monuments to their own misty visions of European-style Romanticism.
The park abounds in obscure corners and crannies where the everyday necessities of its maintenance can be stumbled upon – as these pallets of dressed stones, ready and waiting to repair walls and pedestals.
The shadows lengthened and deepened as we talked, trying to think if there was any modern poet who could approach the openness and sincerity that characterizes the imagery of St. John of the Cross (when, for example, he talks about Christ approaching him in a garden in the dark and wounding him on the neck).
"Hopkins?"
"No."
"Lowell?"
"No."
"Sexton?"
"Certainly not!"
And then the excursion was over. It was getting cold.