CAROLE MORA

Denatured

A denatured city can hold no meadows, no ponds full of Bluegills,
xxxxno geese on migration. The birds winging away as if nothing at all
down below mattered one iota have a name, but I can't always tell you
xxxxwhat it is. I can name a tree or two, a flower, shrub, or weed, but not
many. And this disturbs me immensely, though the birds are never
xxxxdisturbed at knowing nothing of Abercrombie & Fitch, Fahrenheit vs.
Centigrade, excellent e-loans, Dragnet or Democrats, one hundred
xxxxcoulombs, magnetic flux density, or Grade A Milk.
As a matter of fact "A" is also the sixth tone in the scale of C major
xxxxor the first tone in the relative minor scale, though the birds know
even less of that, even if Max Ernst painted them quite a lot, birds I mean.
xxxxDorothea must have felt the way I do sometimes. Those girls in the wrecked
green hallway with the giant yellow sunflower look deranged. All I can say is
xxxxI'd like to find an origin like water, like to give this place a good soak,
just as much as that awful cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard could use
xxxxsomething, its so dingy, with that Hollywood Forever sign, an infinitely
sad replica of the Kodak color version that can be seen on-line –– which is
xxxxanother thing Keats would never have imagined, no more so than
I can dream of writing an ode, though I do, while trying to cultivate
xxxxsome possibility of a native state, here in the midst of some other nature.