J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change nor…

Griffith Park, Los Angeles

Every living heart . . . all over this broad land, will yet swell . . . , when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
—Abraham Lincoln

Because the body now and its organs suggest nothing

but those pathologies in which we’ve been instructed,

Because the gutter’s black as new blood, a Petri dish

of piss and teeth knocked loose at the root,

Because our walking here’s scared up pigeons and the air’s

thick with their disease, because, therefore, we’re holding

Our breath in silent prayer, Good People of Los Angeles,

for our immune systems, for hand sanitizer,

For swift and decisive return of the sun’s irradiating

grace, I can hardly say I even know you much

Beyond the turnstile’s slick in the discount supermarket,

the sidewalk’s chewing gum and tuberculosis.

But I’ve been thinking of you, of your eyes darting behind

the tinted lenses which minimize exposure to UV, to God-

Knows-what, even though it’s dark this morning, cold, cold,

at least, by our way of thinking: frond-tips glimpsed

Through fog-bank, a dew so lightly acidic we’ve forgotten

it’s the cause of these few more leaves dropped

From evergreens, the rasp at the back of the throat.

Members of the Taxpayer’s Association, divorce

Attorneys, Good People of Bel Air, you who keep eyes dead

ahead at the top of freeway off-ramps, who refuse guilt,

That scrap cardboard hungry sign slung over a stack of bones,

entrance within the Town Car’s four doors, the pure, leather-

Scented air there, I’ve been thinking about those

other ones, the thousands of indigents and itinerants,

Formerly among us and suffering the debit card’s curse

on the panhandler, who today, because it is December

And dark, because after cremation they’ve gone so long

unclaimed, will be buried in mass anonymity somewhere

Far from here, Boyle Heights or East LA, somewhere

unremarkable: flatland, barred windows, chain-link.

There’s a minimum of ceremony. A short benediction

and half a handful of city employees. Dogs watch

From a distance. It takes a certain kind of distraction,

a remarkable forgetfulness to not recognize

In those nameless something of that little tyrant, The Self,

to let history and language fail, let the world outside

Dissolve, a mentholated lozenge on the tongue.

The taste it leaves is the inability to taste anything else,

And at bottom of the park’s southern slope, beneath

the Hollywood Hills and their Attendant, Contempt, one

Who’s wandered a few too many blocks from the halfway

house’s steadying three-times-daily belts into Los Feliz

Boulevard’s early rush a few bars of O Lord,

won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? before schizophrenia

Changes key again into abject terror’s primal screech.

What’s remarkable then is the passing jogger’s scandalized

I could just die and the morning’s usual by-the-numbers.

All over the basin pyschotherapists await the DSM-V’s

New-phone-book thud on the doorstep, and grave shift

cryogenicists make the last rounds, check temps, check

The corresponding boxes on log sheets while we continue

in our unrelenting interrogation of the body: Liver!

How do you plot against me today? Brain! you’ve gone soft. As if

deep-within’s crowded tissues could confess the knowledge

We most desire, as if we’d not already allowed our private

pandemic to order our days as on a clear plastic pill case,

As if, I mean, to function were synonymous with to live.

Right down to it, we all know Death’s no more likely

To knock and announce than the LAPD, and though

he may be gentler, he will not, in the end, read perfunctorily

From a list of rights meant to protect us. Everything

we’ve said has always been used against us. Los Feliz:

The Happy Ones. We mispronounce. Force a rhyme

with Felix. Mispronounce and counteract even irony’s

Potential side effects. Los Feliz. The Homeless. The Lesser

and Underprivileged. The Disturbed. May they all someday

Rest in peace. Good night, Sweet Paupers. Abstraction’s

its own little crime against humanity, but euphemism

Is still a lovely word to say aloud. Los Ángeles.

But what angel is this? Stretched half across the footpath,

Its body’s a grotesque, everywhere swollen

and withered at once. It’s gone septic, it’s gone

Almost entirely. And what worthless paper is that man

fumbling with as he approaches? A thinning five maybe,

Lincoln’s etched face a gaunt pockmark, beard and ears,

or else the “Elegy for Sky & Gooseflesh” penciled

On an expired bus transfer? It’s a worthless scene:

a man in headphones and an angel which actually appears

To be something much more like a beggar, except

that it’s passed out and so freed of the beggar’s contractual

Obligations. Starved and curled into itself, it looks

freed even of this world, like something almost not

There at all, a fact the man uses as excuse to keep walking,

his step timed to the beat, his eyes scanning ahead

For needles, slivered glass, the more subtle sort of dangers.

What else could he possibly do? Kneel down

And slip stealthily something into the blistered palm

of its hand? Cover its body with the fallen fronds

Which we can’t now help but imagine as resembling wings

because we’re thinking instead of a man slowly dying

In a public park about a real angel and so The Eternal

and so the failing health of our own souls, a disorder

For which the FDA has yet approved no treatment. Disorder,

as if it were simply a matter of finding the right arrangement

Of bodies in space. But what can we do, all exactly mad

with grief for ourselves or hobbled with debt’s deep

Tissue bruise? Because in mourning we are to gather

together, Shoppers of the Miracle Mile, Day Traders,

Night Watchmen, but we’re all just standing here

like fools, unable to look each other in the eyes,

Unable to believe in anything at the unchanging core

of being but a phantom limb’s complete and constant

Wing-ache, because we are what multiplies, the desert

as it reaches towards even you, Citizens of the Once Frozen

North. In mourning we are to remember, but memory’s

emaciated; there was something supposed to become more

Perfect, something else about what always comes of tyrants,

but who knows? In mourning we meet in need,

But here in a circle at last, tell me what ridiculous things

we could possibly ask of each other. Spare a buck?

Sing a little prayer for me? The overcast buckles

under the weight of a singed and empty sky. Because

There’s next to nothing left, America, call our

name; please, won’t you please lay on your hands?

Source: Poetry (November 2009)