Steve De France, MFA, has traveled widely in the United States. On more than one occasion he hitchhiked across America. He rode rails on freight trains, worked as a laborer with pick-up gangs in Arizona, dug swimming pools in Texas, did 33 days in the Pecos city jail as a vagrant, fought bulls in Mexico, and dove for salvage off a small island on the coast of Mazatlan. His poetry has been published in most of the English-speaking countries of the world. Some recent publications include The Evergreen Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Sun, Rattle, and many others. He has won writing awards in England and in the the United States. He continues to write poetry, plays, essays, and short stories.
Fog
By Steve De France
By Steve De France
Fog rolls over a seaweed mottled beach,
swirls across a busy Ocean Boulevard
and gathers at the San Francisco Zoo.
Settling in ethereal shrouds on
animal exhibits & making mystic
the evergreen trees.
Caged flamingoes with legs too delicate
to survive this world stand etched
in the mist like plastic sentinels surrounded
by Styrofoam shards. Depthless flamingo eyes
follow as a flurry of shrieking kids flush me
toward another more obscure path.
Monkey Island.
I was here once as a student.
I think I was in love.
But time has changed all.
The Island’s gone now & love savaged,
so too its rock-to-ground-to-tree inhabitants.
Today it is a grubby caged pit
occupied by two decrepit chimpanzees,
a shambling shaggy gray, the other
a black & white with a prosthetic leg.
I speculate on these two veterans.
Were they part of the original
island population?
Gothic Punks from The City,
pierced & tattooed, shout & throw
peanuts at the cage. The chimps
tilt bored glances at them.
I consider time and destruction.
The chimps eye me strangely.
I too have grown older–
do they recognize me? We stare at
each other, looking for answers
or maybe new questions.
The temperature dips as a Northern wind
rolls a second screen of fog across
a wrinkled slate-colored sea toward
the ruins of what was once Monkey Island.
Soon the three of us are bound together.
Blinded inside our memories
by time and enveloping fog.
