Language of the Birds Unveiled on Broadway and Columbus

Press Release
"Words take wing in North Beach artwork" San Francisco Chronicle November 24, 2008
"Bohemian Universe" Genny Lim - Read by the poet at the dedication

Bohemian Universe

This is the center of the universe
The Grand Central on Broadway
Where the past, present and future collide
Where freeways combust and go elsewhere
Like pigeons on statuary, folks come n’ go
Businesses come n’ go, Big Al’s, Basin Street West
World Theater, Hungry I, the Jazz Workshop
This is where the old become the new
and the new become the old
Clinging to crumbling asphalt n’ brick
the memories pull you in like gravity
Old Jean Parker n’ Washington Irving on
Broadway sandwiched between Chinatown and
the International Settlement with its ‘girlie girls’
long before Carol Doda hit with her topless tits and
the undertow of stale whiskey, beer n’ puke flowed
Monday morning sidewalks enroute to fourth grade
with my pawn shop violin and baloney sandwich
I dodged the stench of garbage cans
the length of Broadway, past Finocchio and
Enrico like a downhill slalom racer
The old places on my block, memorized like veins
Little City News on Union, the old Italian grocery
where I bought black licorice sticks for a penny a piece
Bazooka gum for a nickel and my favorite splurge
Cho-Cho’s push-up, chocolate malt ice-cream!
The old Sicilian couple argued out loud in
their old language, the way my folks’
argued out loud in their old language
indifferent to us kids, who would replace them
some day like Trattoria Contadina and
valet parking now serving their corner
I knew every smell by heart
The salami factory, the ravioli and cheese factory
The sourdough, focaccia bread and Spaghetti Factory
Where I caught my first breathless flamenco
with garlic bread and fresh Malvina espresso
On Sunday mornings I’d awaken to the
St. Peter and Paul and St. Francis steeple bells
proclaiming to the four corners of the earth
that all was well and all would remain as so
The old Rexall Drugs, the Five and Ten on Stockton
City Lights, Splendid soda fountain, where I ordered
peppermint candy and root beer float from
the limping, deaf old spectacled Italian with
his bald Mt. Fuji rim of white hair
solemnly sweeping out gentrification and its
Vesuvius of tin cans, produce markets and
crush of Chinese housewives and tourists
yakking like saxophones from the ol’ Blackhawk
Oblivious to the archaic or what would one day
riff them out in the diaspora of midnight
A strange confederacy of birds we are
who are gathered here for a chance meeting
only to scatter, fleeting and seasonable as
stacked persimmons and Dungeness crab
sidewalk after sidewalk, face after face
in the debris of broken glass and rotting cabbages
in the glint of store-front windows
Italian coffee, roast duck, jazz and strip-tease
This is our archeology
the juice and the junk in our blood!

Nov. 23, 2008
by Genny Lim