This morning I came across this exquisite poem, included in
American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement, edited by Virgil Suarez and Ryan G. Van Cleave (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001)
The Sirens of Los AngelesBruce Bond
All summer as the blacktop softens, drugged
in an ether of smog and visible heat,
you can hear the car stereos hard at work,
the bass throb of vans blooming at stoplights,
a shushing window and its flash of song.
Light burns on a fender in a sluggish tide
of fenders, the whole flammable basin
now littered in dry birds and foxtails.
I love this city, however long I soak
in the shadows of my shirt, in the dark
plumes of riot and anrgy script, a wash
of syringes under the pier. It's the dark
a singer leans her mike to, saying
noto the world the way a child says
no.
Palms beat their shredded wings in the sun.
They too are waiting for the earth to move.
No word for the phone-pole repairman lashed
to his mast, a song blasting in his headset,
drowning the street in solitary music.
An ambulance parts the waters of our traffic --
one life,
one life, it says -- and the cars
wash back to bury its path. When the sun sets,
it trails a fluorescence of theaters
and taillights, the fresh stupor of children
streaked in purple; there's an art to forgetting
that oceans know, swallowing the day's pill
of fire. The floodlit heads on billboards lay
their layers over the heads before them,
wave on wave of blind eyes and giant teeth.
Every day the world is growing younger.
We could drive to the darkest crest and look back,
the city cracked open like a radio.
In the distance a living wire of sound.
Copters prick the alleys with their spotlights.
We could work our lives with wax in our ears
and fool no one; even in our sleep we hear
the echoes blossom in the throats of dogs--
or is it our sleeping throats we hear--
each heart a bottle of blood impatient
for land and feasting, longing to be poured.
