The River: Book One (Sections 1-17)
"To make a start
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means"
—Wm. Carlos Williams
Paterson: Book 1
Feb. 15 '93
1
Los Feliz Blvd Bridge:
The flood water watchers
feel the power of the river
roaring underneath their feet
as the rain pelts the pavement,
swelling the river even further.
This bridge went out in the flood of 1936
A tree trunk broadsides
the bridge's buttresses.
At 30 m.p.h., the whole structure
takes the shock. All of us feel it
in the dark. We laugh nervously,
caught in the headlights
of a video van.
Lit by a field producer, the weather man does his midnight stand-up.
2
To lay this down once and for all.
To lay my burdens down.
To lay my body down.
That'll be the day.
3
Climbing up into the San Gabriels
in a caravan of cars behind Jim
and Jack and Dorothy Green and
Tom Janeway and Torii getting antsy,
"I want to see the creek." We get there.
Torii crawls out on
a branch above a
waterfall, calling
back at us,
"Two rocks!"
When we turn around,
we think we see
the chilly waters descending
into Greater Los Angeles.
4
Catherine Mulholland says
that when she was a girl sometimes
you'd have to row to Van Nuys High School.
Now the school is bordered by deep concrete canals.
There used to be
enough water to
irrigate with
nearly all year-round
around here.
Where did it go?
Literally, where did it go?
Now there's just the
Technical Advisory Board
of Friends of the Los Angeles River
trying to figure out
how much of it
has been lost.
5
Very intense dreams
I must be coming
down with something.
I hope it's nothing
nearly as intense
as my vision of Earth
as the New Mars—
red dust storms rolling
around a planet
that died a long time ago.
6
At the overflow ponds
between the river and the
Virginia Country Club
I saw a Great Blue Heron
regurgitate its lunch, a
foot-long carp that was
still struggling for its life,
as he beat it to death against
a rock. His wings raised,
his shoulders hunched,
the Blue wards off a snowy white
American Egret
that's jabbing its beak
into the back of the Blue's
trying to get at his food.
The Blue Line train
rumbles by overhead
with its passengers
pointed toward Los Angeles.
No one even looks up from
their newspapers, the
Press-Telegram and the
Daily Breeze.
7
What is a river
little boys throwing
rocks in
to hear them plop.
Bigger boys on mopeds.
Big boys drinking port wine
smash their bottles,
showering the concreted river shoulder
with glittering glass.
Pelicans dive into a
school of fish just down-
stream from the Anaheim Street Bridge
in Long Beach,
the distant Vincent Thomas
barely visible as the rain descends.
It doesn't pay to be
merely pictorial.
Pelicans, you must be
the agents of your
own survival.
8
I wish you would
walk with me here
more often—
red-wing blackbirds
nesting in the cat-tails
electricity humming
in the high-tension lines.
9
In this terrible dream
my poetry books
were left to moulder
in the Rose Garden
while I did the play-by-play
for my son's high school football games.
What I objected to was the cliché'd rain
beating down on the heartfelt city
like tears. What I objected to
was the 1000's of storm drains
that carrier our garbage
down the river to the sea.
10
My sunglasses flipped off my head
and fell into the river with a splash
while the cameras whirred.
What did I learn at the Water & Power meeting?
Don't be cool.
It's not Us vs. Them
It's the wind
as it bends 'cross the river.
It's the cottonwoods
as the garbage that festooned their branches
at the end of the rainy season
disappears beneath their delicately curling
pale-green foliages
by the middle of Spring.
11
The man is in the river.
The woman is the river.
The man is washing his clothes.
12
15 year-old
Adam Bischoff
reaches desperately
for the out-
stretched fireman's hand;
but the river's too fast.
It rolls him
underneath the Balboa Blvd Bridge.
He's already
half-dead,
his body temperature falling into hypothermia;
fighting
to keep himself from falling asleep
as a rope ladder suspended from a
swift water rescue team helicopter
bobs just out of reach.
His rescuers
watch helplessly
from the banks
as he disappears
through the weir into
our ancient fear
of drowning.
13
I like the way you
bent over naked, flesh
café au lait in the moonlight
through the bay laurel,
to take my cock.
14
Underneath the
Glendale Freeway Bridge
a troll leans out at me,
howling drunkenly
"I luuuuuve yoooo!"
I blow him a kiss
as I jog by on my first run
home from the Doctor's
Just wanting to check how
the organism is operating.
I reach into my lungs
for more energy and bend
into the oxbow that starts
at the north end of the
Taylor Yard. The first thing
I ever learned about the river
was that it wanted to wend.
15
The morning was clear and crisp.
I wore a hand-me-down tweed suit from Mr. Guy.
I walked along the river with the Mayor
and a few city councilmen. It was a pure
photo opportunity. It flutters into my memory
like a snapshot taken by a friend of mine,
Mr. Big Greg Edwards, or "Treetop" as he used to be
called before he started painting and
signing his works "Gregory."
16
THE FOUNDING OF FRIENDS OF THE LOS ANGELES RIVER
Pat Patterson, Roger Wong, and I
meet Fred Fisher
at the old Challenge Dairy on Vignes Street
for early morning
brandies and coffee.
We are on our way
down to the river
for the first time.
We carry heavy duty wire clippers
to cut through the fence beside the
1st Street Bridge courtesy of Gregg Gannon,
then we
climb down the steep,
cement-covered bank
to the river.
We don't know where we're going exactly.
We walk upstream
to where the Arroyo Seco
flows into the Los Angeles.
This must have been
one of the most beautiful places
around here, once—
a thicket, a confluence,
an Avalon at the meeting
of year-round streams.
Dear quiver at the edge of memory.
Night herons splash.
There are steelhead. We don't like
to look backwards.
Now there are railroad tracks
on both banks of the river, two freeway
bridges—the 110, and the 5—cross it.
Through a tunnel where somebody is
sleeping on a grey mattress
in a torched VW van,
the Arroyo meekly flows.
Cement will turn back,
into sand some day. Today there's
thirty guys with jackhammers, leveling
the pavement
ahead of an airport runway paving machine.
It makes an unholy noise,
so we address ourselves to the river.
We ask if we can
speak on its behalf
in the human realm.
We can't hear the river saying no
so we get to work.
News Item: Devil's Gate Dam is re-named the
Hahamungna Watershed Park. In Gabrieleno,
Hahamungna means "Flowing Waters, Fertile Valley."
Today the Hahamungna flows into the Los
Angeles northwest of downtown. What was the Los Angeles River called
before the arrival of the Christian priests?
Copyright Credit: Lewis MacAdams, "The River: Book One (Sections 1-17)" from Dear Oxygen: New & Selected Poems 1966-2011. Copyright © 2011 by Lewis MacAdams. Reprinted by permission of Natalia & Torii MacAdams.
Source: Dear Oxygen: New & Selected Poems 1966-2011 (University of New Orleans, 2011)