San Francisco at the present time is like the crater of a volcano, 

around which are camped tens of thousands of refugees. —Jack London

The boom’s at its apex and I take N Judah 

the last leg of my commute 

along Embarcadero to the foot of 3rd 

where Pac Bell Park screeches its coliseum 

shape into existence, honeycombed 

with scaffolding and cranes, hard hats 

swarming jack-hammered sidewalks. 

Plywood tunnels guide me 

past the burnt-pork smell of the drive-through 

donut place, past granite facades to my job 

where the dot com startup bristles with important 

confusion: wine going online, 

Napa Valley delivered to Iowa tax free. 

On a break, down the street I find a marble plaque 

like a lonely headstone, embedded 

in defunct Wells Fargo branch, marking 

Jack London’s birthplace.

His mother’s story long forgotten. How she tried 

suicide, abandoned by her lover, pregnant 

and penniless. The small revolver’s bullet 

deflected, she accepted (grudgingly) 

Nancy Slocum’s generosity and shelter, 

gave birth right at this spot, in peace

out of wedlock. I don’t think she’d care 

that the Bay is silted in under the construction zone, 

that a creek named after excrement flows 

where the beach was. 

I care that Jack London was born here, 

was almost not born anywhere. 

The rising baseball stadium disavows scandal 

before a Giant even spits 

on the new sod, disowns its birth name 

like a runaway. 

Its being will shift with the inevitable trembling

under the city’s relentless 
renewal.