Started this one almost a month ago. Or met the idea then, anyhow. And maybe next month I'll still be tinkering. To get to the bourgeois pig tonight we walked from foothill to canyon, unlit streets where the air is thick with boxwood and jasmine, and the trees are thick with pale green leaves. I wondered if the trees were flowering, the air was so fragrant, the leaves so bright, their color concealed under the backlit fog. Spring in L.A.
5. Miracle Mile
When the man at the bus stop asks me
about the name, I have nothing to
offer but the memory of vanished
wealth, the swank and strut of well-fed men,
their cowbird love of gleam. But he is
looking for milagros, a sudden scent
of roses, the floors around a bed
littered with the shells of broken fevers,
cast-off pain. Neither of us would discount,
say, a sinkhole that engulfed a house
but filled, in time, with lotus, egrets.
Loss can bring its own potent miracles.
Nothing yet, but we are patient. So
much can happen in the space of a block.
4/6/07
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