ladyjendifi | The Path to the Milky Way Leads Through Los Angeles (Reply)

I will be presenting my spring break adventures back to front, starting with the last days and moving toward the first. Each will have a poem and accompanying photos. So, without further ado...

There are strangers above me, below me and all around me and we are all strange in this place of recent invention.
This city named for angels appears naked and stripped of anything
resembling
the shaking of turtle shells, the songs of human voices on a summer night outside Okmulgee.
Yet, it's perpetually summer here, and beautiful. The shimmer of gods is
easier
to perceive at sunrise or dusk,
when those who remember us here in the illusion of the marketplace turn toward the changing of the sun and say our names.
We matter to somebody,
We must matter to the strange god who imagines us as we revolve together
in
the dark sky on the path to the Milky Way.
We can't easily see that starry road from the perspective of the crossing of boulevards, can't hear it in the whine of civilization or taste the minerals of planets in hamburgers.
But we can buy a map here of the stars' homes, dial a tine for dangerous
love,
choose form several brands of water or a hiss of oxygen for gentle
rejuvenation.
Everyone knows you can't buy love but you can still sell your soul for less
than a song to a stranger who will sell it to someone else for a profit until you're owned by a company of strangers
in the city of the strange and getting stranger.
I'd rather understand how to sing from a crow
who was never good at singing or much of anything
but finding gold in the trash of humans.
So what are we doing here I ask the crow parading on the ledge of falling
that
hangs over this precarious city?
Crow just laughs and says wait, wait and see and I am waiting and not
seeing
anything, not just yet.
But like crow I collect the shine of anything beautiful I can find.
-- Joy Harjo, 2000