Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia

PSALM OF THE HEIGHTS

You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles

Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.

Up in the heights of the Hollywood Hills

You can mute the sounds and find perspective.

The pulsing anger of the traffic dissipates,

And our swank unmanageable metropolis

Dissolves with all its signage and its sewage—

Until only the radiance remains.

That’s when the City of Angels appears,

Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.

The boulevards unfold in brilliant lines.

The freeways flow like shining rivers.

The moving lights stretch into vast

And secret shapes, invisible at street level.

At the horizon, the city rises into sky,

Our demi-galaxy brighter than the zodiac.

II.

Surely our destinies are written in this zodiac,

Whose courses and conjunctions govern us.

Look down and name our starry constellations—

Wilshire, Olympic, Santa Monica.

In speeding Comets or sleek Thunderbirds,

We traveled the twelve Houses of the Heavens

Ascending Crenshaw, Sunset, or Imperial,

Locked in our private worlds of lust or laughter.

Who will cast the charts of our radiant sorrow,

Or trace the secret transits of our joy?

The traffic shimmers in its fixed trajectories,

Dense and indifferent as nebulae.

Though you resist the gaudy spectacle,

You can’t escape the city’s sortilege.

III.

Move away, if you wish, to the white Sierras,

Or huddle in the smoky canyons of Manhattan.

You’ll miss the juvenescent rapture of LA

Where ecstasy cohabits with despair,

Lascivious and fitful as a pair of lovers.

Let someone else play grown-up.

Here the soul sings like a car radio, and no one

Asks your age because we’re all immortal.

Inhale the spices of the midnight air

Drifting from Thai Town and Little Armenia.

Here on the hilltop, the city whispers to you,

“Come down and play in the traffic.

Merge into the moving lights, our myriad,

The luminous multitudes that surround you.

Join their fiery orbit. Shine with us tonight.

Where else can you become a star?”

—from Rattle #70, Winter 2020

__________

Dana Gioia: “I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I still live there part of each year. It is the urban and cultural world that formed my imagination. Yet I’ve always found LA hard to capture in poetry; it is so huge, various, and volatile. Los Angeles inspires passionate feelings—most of them mixed. Snapshots can’t do it justice. It needs a panorama. I have just written a sequence of three wide-screen poems about LA. ‘Psalm of the Heights’ is the central section. The poem takes place in the mind of a person standing, late at night, high in the Hollywood Hills, looking down on the expanse of the city. The poem is written in free verse couplets haunted, to use Eliot’s term, by ‘the ghost’ of meter. I wanted the language, like the nocturnal city it describes, to have a secret identity.” (web)

Dana Gioia was the guest on Rattlecast #77. Click here to watch …

Dana Gioia

THE LITANY

This is a litany of lost things,

a canon of possessions dispossessed,

a photograph, an old address, a key.

It is a list of words to memorize

or to forget— of amo, amas, amat,

the conjugations of a dead tongue

in which the final sentence has been spoken.

This is the liturgy of rain,

falling on mountain, field, and ocean—

indifferent, anonymous, complete—

of water infinitesimally slow,

sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,

gathering in springs, then rising without our agency,

only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,

to candles guttering and darkness undivided,

to incense drifting into emptiness.

It is the smile of a stone Madonna

and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,

a benediction on the death of a young god,

brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,

to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,

to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,

settling indifferently on books and beds.

This is a prayer to praise what we become,

“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”

Savor its taste—the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,

for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,

a rosary of words to count out time’s

illusions, all the minutes, hours, days

the calendar compounds as if the past

existed somewhere—like an inheritance

still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,

my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist

steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,

the shattered river rising as it falls—

splintering the light, swirling it skyward,

neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,

even as it vanishes—were not our life.

—from Rattle #20, Winter 2003
Tribute to Italian Poets

This week’s guest on the Rattlecast is Dana Gioia. Watch it live live at 9pm EST!

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

February 1, 2021

November 22, 2013