San Francisco Faces

San Franciscans, California Street, April 2007.

From "Faces" by Walt Whitman

Sauntering the pavement, or riding the country by-road -- lo! such faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality;
The spiritual, prescient face -- the always welcome, common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music -- the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad at the back-top;
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows -- the shaved blanch'd faces of orthodox citizens;
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist's face;
The ugly face of some beautiful Soul, the handsome detested or despised face;
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of many children;
The face of an amour, the face of veneration;
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock;
The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face;
A wild hawk, his wings clipp'd by the clipper;
A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder.

Sauntering the pavement, thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry,
faces, and faces, and faces:
I see them, and complain not, and am content with all.