Being One of the Veronese Della Scala, However Uncertain and Much Distant, I Too Went Down Where the Sea Is Trying to Give Birth to a New Atlantis

 

Los Angeles—oh yes, that living emblem,
America writ large beside the sea,

just as New York City is—
that dented great apple
of knowing and not knowing
much of good and much of evil—

or like Las Vegas,
the den of thieves
and bacchanalias of rushing nights,

where all who enter somehow remain
within that desert Garden of Eden,
its money minted from fever and dreams.

So what then of Los Angeles
and its Orpheums?

Do pagan Hades and Christian Hells
likewise keep their homeless
upon the streets—

within the selfsame pageant, revel, and reveal
of basic human need
and this Divine Comedy?

Surely there, everyone—
everything that, despite itself,
still manages to remain human
to even the slimmest degree—

must be one of those lost, yet brimful angels,

hovering and circling
like the terminal, falling stars
of The Republic,

thirsting after oblivion
while standing on the brink
of bringing back Atlantis—

in defiance of the sidetracked celestial gods,

that Emporium leaving
the Gates of Horn wide open,

so that what is above
and what lies below
may mix and flux
until who is who dissolves—

an Empire of Water,
souls deliquesced and loosed,
each surrendered
to its indiscriminately chosen poison.

Oh yes—where else
would the powers that be
place a hive

for so many angels with broken wings,

whose stumps are growing
blades rinsed in Styx?