The rust on the rooster-crown roofs
Of still fans in sultry gray,
There's no wind to ruffle the Santa Ana grasses
Finally present with the moment
Soulful with emptiness.
Children's worlds of plastic swings
And suspended upturned trikes
Lie like still lives in the barbed backyards
With no reason to do anything but live
—Something we can do outside of them,Finally free as jays.
Even the paper debris is free
To collect itself in peace
By whatever fences once held them still,
Wherever their trestles ended up,
What we now may call real.
Container cars whose emptiness
Reminds us how much holier it is
To be an echo
Than whatever can't be seen
In endless carriage tracking west
Under the collective judgment of stars.
And then the messages flash
In slick black Liquitex
And incandescent Krylon
—Not to be understood or even seen,
It is the urge of the eye merely
That connects to what they know,
The chimeras of what once seemed realized.
Like the plastic bags in shopping carts
In the cul de sac beside the freeway,
Once they were as lithe as dreams
And now they dream alone
With the free people motionless now
In dust shrubs peering over kingdoms of waste
That were never anything but places they could go
And not be discovered.
All of us want that
But the all-seeing eye
Must peek inside the packages
Now stranded on the tracks,
Savor the last
Morsel of liberty.
As the train winds upstream
Some answering currents
Flow back to what might have been
And what never was lies ahead,
A gleaming city of blue!
The root of all sadness
Is cutting oneself off
From love.
