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offer in the way of abandoned Christmas trees.
    The person who drove us around the next day
desires to remain anonymous. He is afraid that he would lose his job and face
financial and social pressures if it got out that he worked with us that day.
    The next morning we started out and we
drove all over San Francisco taking photographs of abandoned Christmas trees.
We faced the project with the zest of a trio of revolutionaries.
    142, 159, 168, 175, 183.
    We would be driving along and spot a
Christmas tree lying perhaps in the front yard of somebody’s lovely house in
Pacific Heights or beside an Italian grocery store in North Beach. We would
suddenly stop and jump out and rush over to the Christmas tree and start taking
pictures from every angle.
    The simple people of San Francisco probably
thought that we were all completely deranged: bizarre. We were traffic stoppers
in the classic tradition.
    199, 215, 227, 233, 245.
    We met the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti out
walking his dog on Potrero Hill. He saw us jump out of the car and immediately
start taking pictures of a fallen Christmas tree lying on the sidewalk.
    277, 278, 279, 280, 281.
    As he walked by, he said, “Taking pictures
of Christmas trees?”
    “Sort of,” we said and all thinking
paranoiacally: I We wanted to keep it a big secret. We thought we really had
something good going and it needed the right amount of discretion before it was
completed.
    So the day passed and our total of
Christmas tree photographs crept over the 200 mark.
    “Don’t you think we have enough now?” Bob
said.
    “No, just a few more,” I said.
    317, 332, 345, 356, 370.
    “Now?” Bob said.
    We had driven all the way across San
Francisco again and were on Telegraph Hill, climbing down a broken staircase to
a vacant lot where somebody had tossed a Christmas tree over a cyclone fence.
The tree had the same candor as Saint Sebastian, arrows and all.
    “No, just a few more,” I said.
    386, 387, 388, 389, 390.
    “We must have enough now,” Bob said.
    “I think so,” I said.
    We were all very happy. That was the first
week of 1964. It was a strange time in America.

The Pacific Ocean
    Today I thought about the Pacific
Ocean on the platform at Shinjuku Station, waiting for the Yamanote Line train.
    I don’t know why I thought about the
Pacific engulfing and devouring itself, the ocean eating itself and getting smaller
and smaller until it was the size of Rhode Island but still eating away and
getting smaller and smaller, an insatiable appetite, getting smaller and
smaller and heavier and heavier, the entire weight of the Pacific Ocean into a smaller
and smaller form until the Pacific Ocean was concentrated into a single drop
weighing trillions of tons. Then the train came and I might add, it was about
time.
    I left the Pacific Ocean behind on the
platform underneath a candy bar wrapper.

Another Texas Ghost
Story
    She is brushing his hair gently with
her hand. She is caressing his face gently with her hand. This is a ghost story.
It begins in West Texas in the early 1930s at night in a large house full of
sleeping people out in the hill country and will eventually end in 1970 at a
picnic gathering of middle-aged people.
    She is standing beside his bed. He is
fifteen years old and almost asleep. She opens the door and comes into his room.
When she opens the door it doesn’t make a sound. She walks silently over to
him. The floor doesn’t creak. He’s so sleepy that he isn’t afraid. She is an
old woman wearing a very careful nightgown. She stands beside him. Her hair
flows down to her waist. It is white with faded yellow in it as if her hair had
once been singed by tire. This is all that is left of having been a golden
blonde woman in the 1890s… perhaps even a West Texas belle with many suitors.
    He stares at her.
    He knows that she is a ghost but he is too
sleepy to be afraid. He has spent the day putting twelve hours of hay into the
barn. Every muscle in his body is beautifully