White T-Shirt

I won’t be at school today.  Instead I will be attending the funeral of a cousin of mine.  For many years now, she has battled cancer, but the cancer finally took her life this week.  She will be missed by all who have ever known her.  She was a good woman.

I had planned on using this poem for Tuesday’s poetry post, but when I read the description about the poem, I decided to use it today.  The poem is called “White T-Shirt” and is by Lewis Ellingham.  The poem ‘White T-shirt’ records a San Francisco bus trip returning homeward from a cancer radiation treatment session at U. C. Hospital (Mt. Zion) mid-December 2012. He’d been writing poems ‘about objects’ for a month or so. The setting collected and intensified as he sat on the bus, and he wrote the poem immediately upon arriving home.

Sometimes we just need a snapshot (visual, verbal, or written) to bring back so many memories…

  by Lewis Ellingham

                                        I caught sight of it at a bus stop:

a white T-shirt, though

                                                     it was partly covered by

     the turning form of a lanky youth massed

                with other human forms intent upon

          boarding the bus on which

                                I was riding, tucked in a corner seat on

                the last row of seats on the bus, the right side, sheltered,

        watching the surge as it entered the double rear doors that

                        soon welcomed as a bottleneck the half dozen

     new passengers — tall, he walked back along the aisle until he stood

                                maybe a dozen feet from me, holding a rail

      with one hand (the right), the other arm dangling, his hips relaxed,

every color — hair, eyebrows, lashes, half-day beard shadow,

        heavy cotton pants, a

jacket dangling from the dangling left arm — black except for his

      white T-shirt, unornamented, the folds from his twist

           as he stood, deep drapery folds, the cotton heavier than ordinary

     for such a garment, the trim at waist and short sleeves the same material rolled,

      eye-catching for its clean bright whiteness, hinting at his beauty, and

                        beautiful in its self:                a white T-shirt, an

        object, he

                                would move slightly, the creases deepen

    as the twist deepened

                             slightly —

                                        at Castro, Market and 17th streets

        he got off, many did, many boarded, his eyes, a light brown, met mine through

                the bus window for a moment, the T-shirt at his neck white,

                                an object still

Born February 27th, 1933, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Ellingham was educated in Catholic schools because his mother, who died when he was two years old, was Catholic. His father, a newspaper executive and Democratic Party leader, was not, and remarried when he was a teenager. By age 21 he had migrated to San Francisco, having tasted bohemian life in Chicago and New York, a lifestyle dictated by an early understanding that he was gay, wanted to be a writer, and was without mainstream social or economic ambitions. He settled in North Beach, in a world centered in bars, odd jobs and the group of poets and painters dominated by Jack Spicer. For him it would remain the same cultural world, the leading influences eventually being Bob Glück’s writing classes and his efforts as a Spicer biographer, culminating in prose in a book co-authored with Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance [1995]. The Birds and Other Poems was published in 2009; new writing continues, now online at The Ellingham Digest.