The sight of electric lights flashing at night, the view of the city
from a cable car, the wonder of great trucks bearing down upon us like
fiery-eyed dragons, a bunch of poppies growing close to the roots of a
billboard in the heart of the city, and the silhouette of a young girl,
wind-blown, so that her straight slender figure shows more beautiful
than the statue that tops Union Square. Up Kearny street the glimpse of
eucalyptus trees on the top of Telegraph Hill standing out against the
pink sunset sky, the postman with his pack of human messages on his
back, the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson in Portsmouth Square, and a
row of old, old men sitting in the sun on Union Square discussing the
Universe.

Did you ever stand listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did
their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the
creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under
the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is
older than the land?

I don't know what it's all about. I only know we need more poets. Still
every man who reacts to life and feels it to be a miracle, he is himself
a poet. Even Whitman could only articulate in terms of wonder.



Impulses and Prohibitions



One day last week a man - a regular man, neither a decided proletarian