East of the Library, Across from the Odd Fellows Building

By August Kleinzahler b. 1949 August Kleinzahler

That bummy smell you meet

off the escalator at Civic Center, right before

you turn onto McAllister,

seems to dwell there, disembodied,

on a shelf above the sidewalk.

The mad old lady with lizard skin

bent double

over her shopping cart

and trailing a cloud of pigeons

is nowhere in sight.

A pile of rags here and there

but no one underneath.

An invisible shrine

commemorating what?

Old mattresses and dusty flesh,

piss and puked-on overcoats, what?

Maybe death,

now there’s a smell that likes to stick around.

You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns

and once

in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly,

after a bite of poundcake.

But here it lives,

cheek by jowl with McDonald’s,

still robust after a night of wind

with its own dark little howdy-do

for the drunks and cops,

social workers and whores,

or the elderly couple from Zurich

leafing cooly through their guidebook.

August Kleinzahler, “East of the Library, Across from the Old Fellows Building” from Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow. Copyright © 1995 by August Kleinzahler. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1995)

Biography

Often described a “pugnacious” and a “pugilist poet,” August Kleinzahler’s reputation rests on his jazzy, formally inventive and energetic poetry, though he has also garnered notice as something of a bad-boy literary outsider prone to picking fights with the establishment. Hailing originally from Fort Lee, New Jersey, and a long-time resident of San Francisco, Kleinzahler’s fame as a colloquial poet of “dive bars, greasy soup, . . .

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