The Place That Inhabits Us:
Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed
Selected by Sixteen Rivers Press
Foreword by Robert Hass
“What a splendid volume of poetry and what an incredible range of poets—including some of the greats as well as the yet unknown—and what a rich and impressive array of topics, themes, settings, and emotions! If you love poetry and poetics, you will be smitten over and over again by this cornucopia, this amazing, diverse harvest.”
—Michael Krasny, Forum, KQED-FM, San Francisco
“One of the great pleasures of this anthology is that, at a certain moment, a group of early-twenty-first-century
poets made a selection of poems about the place that mattered to them, so that this book is about
the experience of place—and about being given the remembered expression of the experience of place by
others who have lived here. And that begins to be a culture.”
—Robert Hass, from the foreword
The poems in this anthology embody what it’s like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in The Place That Inhabits Us are drawn from both a physical and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the ’hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, the mental maps “that for humans,” writes Robert Hass in the foreword, “make a place a place.” Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us.
POEMS FROM The Place That Inhabits Us
Green Hills by Kay Ryan
Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the language of their
rolling over.
Time Spirals by Kenneth Rexroth
Under the second moon the
Salmon come, up Tomales
Bay, up Papermill Creek, up
The narrow gorge to their spawning
Beds in Devil’s Gulch. Although
I expect them, I walk by the
Stream and hear them splashing and
Discover them each year with
A start. When they are frightened
They charge the shallows, their immense
Red and blue bodies thrashing
Out of the water over
The cobbles; undisturbed, they
Lie in pools. The struggling
Males poise and dart and recoil.
The females like quiet, pulsing
With birth. Soon all of them will
Be dead, their handsome bodies
Ragged and putrid, half the flesh
Battered away by their great
Lust. I sit for a long time
In the chilly sunlight by
The pool below my cabin
And think of my own life—so much
Wasted, so much lost, all the
Pain, all the deaths and dead ends,
So very little gained after
It all. Late in the night I
Come down for a drink. I hear
Them rushing at one another
In the dark. The surface of
The pool rocks. The half moon throbs
On the broken water. I
Touch the water. It is black,
Frosty. Frail blades of ice form
On the edges. In the cold
Night the stream flows away, out
Of the mountain, towards the bay,
Bound on its long recurrent
Cycle from the sky to the sea.
