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
