Los Angeles, Fin de Siècle
By Maurya Simon
Delirium in the downtown mall today:
Burt Reynolds! All the henna-haired girls
sneer, while their mothers, enthralled, say,
“I saw you in this, I saw you in that–
you were marvelous, simply marvelous.”
Outside, evening lies down flat
like a Hindu fakir on its bed of nails.
Smog homogenizes the golden air
as clouds sweep by on blackened sails.
Under freeway columns, homeless men
warm their dirty hands over rusty flames;
a radio’s sputter, an old tom-tom drum,
an eyeless doll’s head, all skip-roll past
into a gutter, to become flotsam and jetsam
upon a river of oil-slicked trash.
And across town the reactor hums to itself.
What song does it sing? Something
about confusion and fission, or else
it mimics the melody of high officials,
with its easy divinity, its double-talk.
It’s a monolithic nightmare, still,
it's beloved by the masses, as is art.
Indeed, a Van Gogh was bought today
for twenty-one million, and in K-Mart
one may purchase t-shirts troubled by poor,
peculiar Vincent’s pained and bandaged face.
The inscription: Lend me your ear.
Inside the hospital beehives, the dreamless
put off death with plastic surgery, if
only superficially; but it’s enough.
“Save your soul for Christ,” brightly proclaims
the sign beneath the Church of Holy Congress.
The swallows still return to Capistrano
from northward, and soon we’ll have a cure
for cancer, poverty, menstrual cramps, even
for boredom, baldness, obesity, and fear.
The twenty-first century looms beyond sin,
Geiger counters, gin, and cash register–
gaunt, air-borne, computerized vision–
but meanwhile: fiestas and incense, serious joys
sprouting like molds in unexpected places,
the sorrow of laundromats, of so much noise.
Maurya Simon, "Los Angeles, Fin de Siècle" from Cartographies. Copyright © 2008 by Maurya Simon. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.