From my vantage point . . .
on this leading edge
of the upward thrust of an american continent where the wide Pacific
winks over my shoulder
at the callow youth of Hollywood Hills dare I admit it . . .
optimism reigns.
I well understand that such sentiment
cuts hard against the grain
of our culture’s malaise
but perhaps there’s much to be learned
from the countervailing spine
of the west’s rogue range.
The Santa Monica offers testimony
to a collision course
of twisted plots
and Euripidean cycles a Dionysian frenzy
stratified in the purple Topanga.
Brute force of geomythic proportions
etched in layers of shale and slate
lies bare where Poseidon’s bedrock
subducted the advance of an entire continent
which perforce of its own reckless momentum
heaved forth its record of subterranean violence:
holy writ on canyon walls.
Los Angeles sprawls below
criss-crossed arteries that pulse
koyaanisqatsi.
There circuits wink in digital ecstasy
the flirtatious impulse of a brazen age
signaling perhaps a memory
made tenuous by synapses that fire
with such exuberance
as to defy pattern
and without pattern
to defy recurrence.
Pure novum
this civitas humanitas kairos in perpetuity.
Now is the time when we slough off the vestiges of a frontier spirit.
Here is the place where we strip and bear no more
the traces of manifest destiny.
From my vantage point . . .
looking out is looking through
space and time,
where the San Gabriel
marks the end of desire,
a towering limit at the edge
of a forbidding legacy
of four millennia of desert crossings.
And there, all along its massive footprint
lies a land aglow, surreal
radiance, utterly contemporary
oblivious to its shadow side but then
in the just beyond
the conestoga laid waste litters that last expanse
of a continent ground into the earth
by an idea more arid than the climate itself,
where all but the pulse —
and sometimes even that —
lay weathered
bleached skulls
that mark a trail of thirst for some hereafter.
But here, at desert’s end
ancient schemes play
themselves out their exhaustion etched
in dusty sediment and gnarled chaparral.
And what remains
but the play of an eerie luminosity
extending eastward to that closed horizon
where the edge of america subvenes the night
and come the dawn wrests aurora to earth.
A new day
with its own promethean fantasy
rolled out as a carpet of light
where men would be gods
and where the gods themselves
had lain prostrate —
the very substratum of this sacrificial basin.
Yet here on the margin
where thinking breaks free
of old constraints these gods form not the bedrock
claimed
by a mythological age
but withhold the lifeblood
that for a time sustained
the paroxysm of a technological era:
lessed crude
long since extracted —
sanguinis christi —
the divine soma like the Mojave, run dry
but deeper in consequence.
A city of angels at once
an infusion of spirit and the exhaustion of soul
sprawls as unfolding implication:
deflated,
but not depleted empty
but not without signification
emphatically post-aquarian—
a slouching beast
become puer aeternitas—
a brilliant flash in the morning sky code perhaps
to some extraterrestrial eye but
in fact in time
a millenarian odyssey to a closed infinity whose dispensation
may well eclipse the sun itself.
Gravity beckons all
the star shines most bright
propenultimate to its collapse
even this great city sinks when eviscerated
vital fluids sucked from its dark interior
stark reminder that techniques
of the sacred— when perverted
in the name of heaven
soon exhaust the lifeblood
that upholds the earth—
reassert themselves
at the edge of our imagining and in so doing
reassert the hold of the earth:
no bodhisattvas here
nor babes in baskets or swaddling clothes neither prophets nor avatars
no wounded healers
save those whose interment
inscribe these canyon walls.
There
a chronicle of uprising and suppression
makes our stories its own:
our cultural vignettes
that strut and fret with sound and fury
rise with this canyon wall and find redemption
in its vast cycles of death and rebirth of decay and renewal
a parry whose latest thrust realigned
mortal antagonists
transforming their collision course reorienting their strife
along an axis mundi — a true meridian — withholding the promise
of a veritable universe . . .
that’s
world enough . . .
given time.