Poetry:
Pace Setter / This Continuous

Catherine Daly
Online instructor of women's studies, literature, and creative writing
West Los Angeles College
E-mail: cadaly@pacbell.net

Pace Setter

Sylmar is the closest exit from town
roadside amenities are minimal: gas, food, lodging.

Its off ramp right-of-way is tawny with seed and pigeons.
The state hasn't watered and rain won't come for six months.
I may never see grass near these idling tractor trailers.

The diner's asphalt is being rinsed.
Goats in the next lot crop grass alongside bales of rusted fencing.
A subdivision of tile-roofed houses with, no doubt, freshly washed driveways
backs onto the lot. This side of the houses is blank.

Sylmar seems like a place to leave what you don't want, forever:
a marriage, a severe diet, a promise you never meant to keep.

A truck and battered handmade sign for a long-gone landscaper point up a
dirt road
opposite the entrance to the industrial park, Valley View Court.
Workers never leave employee lunch tables on patios under canvas umbrellas,
come the way I came.

They make pace makers
the size of two quarters stacked.
A tiny spring screws into the heart.

To hold a spring is to never want a cheeseburger again, to feel your chest
hurt,
to never want to train machine makers to weld the smallest welds, give up
jewelry, makeup, and perfume (some have tattooed eyeliner) to keep the
environment sterile;
to never assume responsibility for the quality
of the not weightless, but miniaturizing, using new alloys, digital, reset
by phone, pace makers.
The machines for people hum.

Returning home, I saw, opposite the on ramp, reservoirs I'd marked on my
map.
They were deep, rich blue.
Orange, roped floaters made them look like swimming pools or tiny seas with
fishing boats.
This is not a pace setter's view.

 

This Continuous

Mist, fog, coal smoke, fog, marine layer, smog:
this might be morning anywhere
air obscures topography,

composes a solo for itself and plays it,
disguises an invisible country --
Agartha, Atlantis, Antibes -- where wind blows.

What is this elevation of grey
but civilization's characteristic,
all our creaturely things
lurking behind curtains.

What is music but birdsong sung not by birds,
vocalized by secretly significant sites.

The hills are a floating world.
Gray dragons race each other, composing themselves,
wrathful, spiny monsters.

As they reach into town, they exhaust themselves,
filtering their underbellies through housing divisions.

Perhaps the San Fernando Valley is a realm of smoke
and therefore flame
and devours itself, like a fugue

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