Pith & Vinegar: "Tourists (photographers)"

Here's a poem from my chapbook, Barking Up the Wrong Tree (1989) that I recently rediscovered. (Kudos to friend and wonder-bassist, Ned Doherty for the canine cover image.) Over the course of preparing my Pith & Vinegar manuscript, poems have been added and subtracted, but what the current version tries to achieve is some kind of balance in terms of numbers of representative poems per book. The trick is finding work that still resonates personally, as well as holds up generally.

I don't remember a specific occurrence that triggered "Tourists (photographers)," but rather an amassed ennui after years of working in San Francisco's financial district and observing the de rigeur ritual of tourists shutterbugging indefatigably every inch of the city.

Tourists (photographers)

snap pictures upward
preserving tallness
(sheer walls of windows)
on film forever.

Where (I think)
do these photos
fit in? Between
baby shots
and bar mitzvahs,

graduation and
surprise parties

in an album set aside
for when guests drop by?
How do you explain
the presence

of a monolith
to the casual page-flipper
bored already
with unfamiliar faces

and shebangs they
weren't invited to?

It doesn't make sense.
But here they converge
(cameras collared
to their necks), snapping

happily ugly skyscrapers
from the cold blackness

their shadows puke out.