Grime and Gold: Imagine a New Los Angeles
1.
Soft wind curling dust.
Cars & trucks lend rhythm
to a Pacoima viaduct dance
with plastic bags,
fast food cartons,
leaves and scrap paper,
trapped in a milky way
on the ground.
Under the roadway, as tires and engines growl above,
a houseless man among an enclave of weathered tents
sits on a bucket, his arms splayed
over a splintered plywood board
on a makeshift desk of boxes.
He draws.
Next to him, an illustrated book of birds,
dirt crusted into cracks of spine and cover.
Using a pencil, the man carefully
incisions the lines,
methodically shades in
a spectrum of black to grey,
on a torn sketchbook page
—his most valued asset—
in a place of no assets
except for what sings in his bones.
He draws
and the city breathes with him:
no smog,
no industry,
no rumbling soundtracks from above.
The birds the air,
the land,
the sun,
the trees,
the earth.
On that blank paper
the man designs another landscape
with no poisons,
with new roads
that curve toward new homes.
He draws birds,
yet I witness in his hand what launches
new spaces,
new parks,
new abodes
where everyone belongs,
where nobody must stake a claim,
because all are claimed,
where no one is blocked from flowering
so birthings appear all the time,
everywhere,
every day,
every hour,
every click
of a clock’s seconds hand.
The drawn birds polished from grime
to gold,
How the more you excavate,
the finer things become,
how the lines
fly
fly
fly
in a vortex of dust and cartons.
2.
The man draws.
Not far from where
a brass foundry once stood on 25 acres,
a company that later betrayed
whole families
—from Mexico, Louisiana, Texas,
Chicago, Korea, Japan, El Salvador—
when the plant shut down
during the cruel decades
of de-industrialization,
hitting Los Angeles
harder than other cities,
decimating the country’s
largest manufacturing center.
A strip mall now sits
where the foundry once sprawled.
Officials claim it took twenty years
to clean the ground,
but neighbors say
the land still reeks of toxic wastes.
Costco, Lowes, Best Buy,
Jamba Juice, Panda Express
now occupy the acreage
of once flame-belching smelters
and casting machines.
The man draws
and as hand reshapes animal
he concocts antidotes
to whatever infested
our days and nights,
whatever skulks from
grease-and-oil works,
from whatever sent fathers and mothers
to early graves, with cancers,
heart disease, diabetes,
all the ailments of advanced
capitalist production,
lured by houses, cars, appliances
in putrefied packages.
The man draws
and an old world vanishes.
The dust swirls and so do our minds.
Not just dreaming within a nightmare,
but in leaps afar—where birds
aren’t imitated
but alive and bright.
The man moves lines
and the world is resurrected
in a contract
between pencil and paper.
3.
Let’s draw the birds
of greater flight.
Let’s sing what is often unsung,
let’s dance as prayer and potion,
let’s paint with cascades of colors,
let’s perform till our hearts sing.
For a Los Angeles worthy
of its angels,
beyond the finite prisons of scarcity,
divisions, power
—all made up stuff—
yet cloaked over us
as if God-given and natural.
What’s called natural is often unnatural.
The organic hand
of a man without a house
is a natural way
of dreaming and living,
of renewal
and abundance,
of intrinsic value,
what generates
over and over
the whirlwinds of change.
Luis Javier Rodriguez is an American poet, novelist, journalist, critic, and columnist. He was the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, identifying himself as a native Xicanx writer.
