Most of the factory windows gone, or crazed:
small-boy-rock ventilation. High-tech
firms have fixed a few, and Kaiser built a new
hospital on a bluff. The old shoreline track,
buttressed by black trestles around the cliffs,
now is light rail: a Muni train. But the few homes still
look trashed and sad--too many decades in eclipse.

I spot a twisting lane up out
of the red zone, into the cape's hill-heart.
Weedy lots and rusty cars fall back; here
dells hide trees with bulbous trunks and
sudden palmlike crowns of dark
divided redwood-needles. The next
grove is taller, and the next, till as we near
the peninsula's south coast, we're

Maybe the cape has microclimates?
A dry north slope, a wetter south.
The City's famed for that--rainforest
fifty yards from sand or chaparral.
Excuses, excuses! On the whole,
north slopes here are greener than south.
We both know who blighted it! Until
1849, giants wall-to-wall.
The quarriers cut them all, all
they could easily haul and ship,
then stripped the very soil.

In an eon or two, the rain will lure
the giants back. But in my life? No.
Giants human-slain take more
than human time to grow.