Big City, Little
Los Angeles
Absence of Mermaids
As a younger
man
(Reprinted unedited from Paris/Atlantic,
Fall 2000) There is a corpse of unrecognizable people lumbering to their graves. a hard two-by-four of incongruous distinctions manifested by a triumvirate of cats and a clique of individuals that make up this whole vessel of bowls. I am being slugged on the noggin by this tactless billy club. I will never make fun of New Jersey again. There is an awful glare to this terrible polish. I long for the web of uneven streets, unjust destiny, and characteristic flaws.
Steve De France
I dreamed of living
in exotic far-off lands
Zanzibar . . . Madagascar,
or wandering in a
reverie
at the paws of the
Egyptian Sphinx.
And there beneath
a fresh-made hornéd moon
specters of Coleridge
and Keats were at my side,
Eliot is there, too.
Wearing only a tie pin.
I tear off my pants,
and dive into forgetful crystal waters,
there in swirling
foam, mermaids sing to me,
their kisses sweet
with amnesia and the salt of sea.
We love like sea horses
on the back of dolphins,
and then my voice
rings out my poem:
volcanoes explode
answering my startled cry for man,
even the dead of Dylan
Sea sing in their chains
like the sounds of
shrieking stones in the rolling surf,
and my young spirit
is large upon the land.
I was a conjurer full
of the touch of the poet.
As an older, but
no smarter man
I live in Los Angeles.
Parts of my dreams
have come true.
many people from far-off
lands live all around me.
Many of them pee on
my lawn
especially when they
celebrate Cinco d'Mayo.
Most of my neighbors
don't talk to me.
It's not entirely
their fault.
I don't like them
much either.
Button-down assholes
all.
Accountants, lawyers,
head doctors,
and an occasional
proctologist,
and up to now
no mermaids at
all.
but when the spirits
and specters of poetry
are hard upon me,
even fornicating in my dreams
I rend all clothes
from my body
and stand naked and
sagging between
alien houses in this
enveloping suburban tract.
And then quite deliberately,
I smile in a Bay window
darkly.
And through the pores
of the houses,
I clearly hear my
neighbors
dying for a dream
or two
in their life fermenting
modular dark.
~ . ~
from "A Commentary on Self as Someone Else"
7.
This is my life:
I move from Brooklyn to the Valley in order to be with my wife.
I live in a pit of suburbia, a basin of fast-food and strip malls caging small, characterless pockets of urban sprawl.
I am surrounded by a mall that is surrounded by a mall — in fact, the whole Valley is a shabby, poorly built, overheating mall —
of useless shops that I'll never patronize and will probably never discern among all the gaudy
signs that sunglasses cannot even protect —