San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California, August 2000. From the base of Coit Tower I looked down at a tall ship standing at the wharf beside a ferry boat—blue Pacific, Golden Gate. And on the other side, the Bay Bridge, the sunlight on the ocean, the asymmetric wake of something coming in—then the pines, the Trans-Am Pyramid.

That same day, in the afternoon, after lunch I sat in a Chinese café and drank tea and watched an earth mover working loudly on a big construction site. Tow-Away, No Stopping Anytime the red letters of a white sign on the chain link fence cautioned. AYKSYP (?) a graffiti artist had tagged up.

Thus some of my notes, anyway, reworked nearly 19 years after those moments of relaxed jotting. And that evening, in the museum, I stood for a long time looking at Magritte’s The Living Mirror,

with its suggested voices

and silences arranged

on a canvas square.