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

As if read to the City Council after it, the council, has read unto us, “The County of Los Angeles recognizes that we occupy 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.”