A World Without Cars

With birthdays but a year and a day apart, and she the elder and young for her age, and he the younger whose turns of phrase grow frankly repetitive, they’d eaten beef in the early days of their joint celebration and across sinewy time, when bodies gray with food beliefs greening, of the baby spinach and veggie lasagna they swore up and down to savor, they left bites on their plates and their stomachs a quarter empty in an inner and outer show of moderation. Pressing her cheek to his to blow out candles one day in their fifties, she wished to herself to feel happy and fulfilled at the time of her death. Like planning a wedding, she arranged the flowers in her head and the ones before them that make the best centerpieces for birthday dinners. He wished that the movie they were seeing later that night would be at least a little entertaining. It was to be a hundred-minute car chase broken up by scenes from the childhoods of the chasers and those chased, as if so many turning points from the deep pasts of so many passengers could justify such a hair-raising event as two cars careening down the highway with little regard or the safety of others. It was after all a hot day and the gist of the chase, like an old-time feud, involved an ancient wound, an insult like a family heirloom, about somebody’s mother that cut to the core of a man’s need to strut his stuff with his chest thrust forward and balls of fist hung like unused mallets. Childhoods aside, the funny part of the chase was the fact that every time the chased sped up, the chaser sped up, and every time the chased slowed down, the chaser slowed down, so that the distance between them remained constant. As you may have guessed, you must suspend your disbelief when it comes to the guzzling of gas. Chalk it up to that six-shooter that in the movies shoots a hundred rounds or more. No one is stopping to reload and underneath it all everyone cares about everyone immensely.

Ode to Failure

A sack of flour serves as a newborn baby in the arms of a boy learning to care for something precious.
Sack of Flour

 

 

All juniors carry a sack of flour around for two weeks like it’s a newborn baby boy. Their grades are based on the health of the boy as determined by the final condition of the sack at the end of the normal timescale long since established. Anyone choosing to spread around the contents of his sack as a repudiation of our timescale is put in charge of a new baby boy to be carried for a period of three weeks to a month depending on the attitude of the new father. Spilled flour results in a third sack, carried a month. If not then, it’s over with. We’re done with him. But that’s not true, is it? We’re never done with each other, so take notes everyone on the protection of a fragile being.

Celebrity

From this spot on Hollywood Boulevard, one can just see the iconic Hollywood sign.

(Hollywood, California)

The County of Los Angeles recognizes its occupation of land originally and still inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples. We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants past, present, and emerging as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters.

If you hear something, it was meant for you. Taking up the pitch within a range, I’m thinking you up a city whose foundation is a timbre. I have in mind a civil service with a few flowers and flumes of music
Begin with a guidepost and let it settle. Mark out its limits with a furrow. How to picture oranges, the riverbed Porciúncula, where water grows buildings instead.
Softened by characters—tender changeling, archangel, the angel you ain’t, the arc of your language—the desert has become little of what it seems. Gazing from rooftop to rooftop from buildings born in the middle of the night, others razed in the name of pleasure, we make a canon with space in the margins for those who deride it
A little light on backbone but broadly built to inhabit shrines, my long lady of the bottom line says instead, “I pick the men I want, and I don’t want you.” But you can have me on the brink of a yell, the addition of sound an epoch in the motion of pictures. If we’re to get anywhere with this, you need to take my place. I offer you the same in return. I hate to see you go. We like to know about the things that hurt us
A civil service with little music and few flowers slips away easy like kind words granted the passer. Like the promise of open space. Like this house and heap of things around me. A forgetfulness in. A city at hand. Whose shall be our eponym? The moment goes with our plot to own it. In pavilions along the palisade. In the doorway under the marquee at dawn. What’s sung of the clamor here. What’s sung. I hunt the sound for you

Memorial to Harry Hay (Silver Lake, Los Angeles)

     

    exit.
               permanent
                                       for
                                                           else
                                bougainvillea                         somewhere
                                                                                                searching
                                                            bush daisies                                     spirits
                                                                                                                       gone
                                                                                                                    dwork like
                                                                        palm trees                                        the woo-
–                                                                                                                            into
                                                                                                                             ows,
                                                                                                                         shad-
                                                                                    pine needles                       into the
                                    apple tree                                ly to 
                                                                                   seem quiet-
           scent
  of parents
passionflower                gray figures, remini-
                                                                          Harry’s approach, these
                              bottle brush                         life will be dead soon. At
agave                         sider the most familiar people in your
                                                  
                                          needn’t lose their urgency even when you con-
     prickly pear         or let nature take it back. The exigencies of our lives
               obscure ranch homes reminiscent of birdhouses. Prune it back
START HERE AND READ UPWARDS to where hills and groves
In Los Angeles recently, my wife and I discovered in a plaque and a flight of stairs a memorial to the activist Harry Hay (1912-2002). He founded the Mattachine Society, probably the first gay rights group in the United States. Our poem, an elegy not unlike those stairs, seems to start on the ground and rise. 
“Giving votes in exchange for ideological support. To wit: identity politics  or homosexuals.” — engraved at the base of the Mattachine Steps, where Harry Hay founded a Mattachine Society (1950)


Complex Objects

 
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