L.A. Observatory

(first impressions of the evening view from Griffith’s Observatory)

The view seizes my breath

As I glimpse this city’s too vast soul.

The sky is a gauze, bathed by photons,

Washing out the distant raging stars,

With a net of rising light,

Cast by fifteen million souls.

The earthbound constellations glimmer through ozone.

They ignite and die in a clicking of switches.

The ground seethes and shimmers

And the Universe, upstaged, is devoid of stars.

Why am I not surprised?

After all,

This is L.A.

A thread of gently falling stars is strung across my eye.

A queue of Boeings,

Sparse along the border of quiescent heaven and boiling earth.

Each mote of light is three hundred lives.

Like me, they await their immersion in a sea of bright and seething light.