Status Updates From The Long Take

Original cities were contained, concentrated social collectives. But Los Angeles is the opposite. Immune to everything but the limits of its host,the city expands at pace - to the edges of its territory: the mountains, its neighbors, the ocean’s verge - an infestation, a carcinoma.

He stayed in for New Year’s Eve, as usual, because of the noise.
Rolling pieces of wet paper into earplugs, he sat at the window,
nursing a bottle, watching the lights.
Always reminded him of the tracers – red, blue and yellow –
our guys firing back from the boats
at the planes coming over. The explosions.
He couldn’t even hear the splash of whiskey in the glass.

The fishermen with the long stares would say the haar is the sea’s breath, and the sea over shingle a dying man’s rattle. It was true for Lachlan from Pleasant Bay, with his face full of shrapnel and the death-shudders. I spaded his pack in after his remains; we were under fire, so a foot-deep had to do.

Late September.
Fire season: that hot, dry wind that gets people edgy,
listless, ready to fight but too tired to try, temperatures swinging
and this yellow light from the north
from the smoke of the wildfires burning
up in the tops of the canyons. You can see them at night
like necklaces, tightening.

The chintz and antimacassars, the china figurines crowding the window sills, all colors faded to pink, pale blue; photographs of the dead, slipped sideways in their mounts; the dining room ‘kept for best’, cold as the tomb and never entered; the smell of wet ash, the gloom of gas-lamps.

It’s getting hotter every day, but after work
up on the Hill, there’s a breeze,
and he buys a paper from the one-armed man
who’s always there in his suit, with one sleeve
pinned up, at his news-stand in the shade
of the pharmacy on 3rd and Grand.
Getting a coke from the cooler outside the Nugent
he goes to sit on the benches, their green paint flaking in the sun.
Old men were out, on corners, watching the world

And an hour of suburbs, before the public-address announcement
and the signs outside as it started to slow:

Welcome to Dreamland, Welcome to Wonderland,
Welcome to Hollywoodland. Welcome
to the City of Angels.

Cactus started giving way to palm, crossing the Colorado
at Yuma, and into California at last: cutting north-west
with mountains on one side and a lake on the other,
its surface-glint like chainmail. He stared harder
and saw it wasn’t water, but dead fish floating,
and the silver beaches weren’t sand, just heads and bones.

The papers say
‘Keep dogs and cats inside on the Fourth of July’
but nothing about ex-servicemen.
You can’t get tanked enough to block
the fireworks’ whine, their
door-burst slam, the rustling
shiver as they fail, fissling away.
So he watches the endless red, white and blue,
remembering he’s here in the States
not on Juno Beach or Bény-sur-Mer.
Star-rockets burst to their edges
with the sparse bright gold