Best of Impossible Worlds: Miriam Sagan’s and Tom Laichas’ Poetry of Place

I have acquainted Miriam Sagan and Tom Laichas through individual poems found in journals and magazines—chance encounters that have urged me to look for more. Hence, I read Laichas’ latest book, Three Hundreds Streets of Venice California, and several ones by Sagan (eventually deciding to focus, for this essay, on Map of the Lost, published in 2008). Since the start, I enjoyed parallel reading of the two authors, as by juxtaposing their distinct voices I could cast more light on the complex, rich subject matter that concerns them both.

***

Sagan clarifies her title (Map of the Lost) in the second poem of the collection, which describes a stroll through the area of Santa Fe, NM, where the poet resides. With her teenage daughter, she walks down the acequia—a dry riverbed, part junkyard, part deserted homeless camp. The girl feels at ease in the semi-wilderness, but when back on paved avenues “immediately becomes lost.”

“I don’t get straight streets,” she says.

My money’s good here, I buy two cups of foamy chai

And look in her face, turning from girl to woman

And want to construct

My map of the lost. (4)

Fine… although the word “lost” is ambiguous at best. Does it mean someone who can’t find her way to somewhere? Will the map provide directions? Or will it locate what someone has lost—people, places, things, memories, dreams… The latter is most plausible. Still, the title is a bit of a paradox. Bit of a riddle, yes, and the cover—vague, if gorgeous, photography of snail tracks on rock, partly ultrasound, partly firmament—confirms the perplexing feeling. A doubt lingers that the lost might well remain such.

The book gathers poetry related to place, but not only and not systematically. It is split into four sections, each focused on a different part of the world (spanning from the US East Coast to Alaska, California, East Europe, and Japan) and a different phase of the poet’s life journey. But the borders are loose, so to speak, and the city of Santa Fe (where Sagan has lived since the nineteen eighties) is a leitmotif permeating all sections, unifying them—like the backing of a quilt, the thread that keeps it together.

Close and assiduous study of a known urban setting necessarily leads to acknowledging change, which in turn highlights the passage of time. The transforming habitat mirrors, of course, our own aging. Each landmark modified or erased corresponds to an era of our life, to a self we used to be, and is equally gone—at least it has shifted, in ways that are usually harder to pinpoint or accept.

In a few poems, the wear and tear of garments echoes the weathering of the neighborhood. Striking images… The dirty straw sandals “with a mood like that of a frayed tatami,” or the “little white bag for clothespins” that, hung twenty years ago on the line by the poet’s late husband, suddenly rots through.

Noticing what deteriorates, disappears, is destroyed, or replaced in the built environment evokes, by contrast, the quest for what remains steady (anchoring the self and enabling it to recall, to link past and present). Throughout the book, while celebrating the impermanent, Sagan points to those rare factors of stability. Nature (which also transforms, of course, but at a less perceptible rate) is one.

The mountains don’t change,

That lovely angle coming into town.

But we have changed, somehow,

Although it’s less easy to explain

Than pointing to what has sprung up,

What has been torn down. (6)

The ocean, on the contrary, is motus continuus.

That is what I learned by the sea.

That everything changes,

That is what I saw. (53)

 and

Confrontation with what can’t be mapped

Or ever stilled—

The end of continent

A self of water. (117)

By its very impregnability, though, water seems to suggest a different kind of permanence. On the shore, a sudden epiphany:

As if the wind knew our middle names.

The name that doesn’t change, that is buried

In the parenthesis between given and family (58)

Which part of the self does this core name, inerasable, stand for? Is it consciousness?

A visit to the Miniature Rooms (tiny dioramas of interiors from diverse world cultures, kept in the Chicago Art Institute) offers another clue.

The world changes, these lighted scenes do not. (103)

As art represents reality in condensed, distilled form, it also crystallizes it. Is the symbol more durable than the experience? It sure is.

If, as we have hypothesized, “lost” is the sum of all things we can’t access—but we did at some point, or we wouldn’t know they are lost—mapping it implies tracing the past, probing the self (as far as it means a compendium of past events, feelings, thoughts) in order to unfold and organize memory.

Secluded, among a multiplicity of selves

Like the child who traces the vast oriental carpet

With a finger, or who runs the little car model

Along the tendrils and medallions

As if they were the streets of some unknown city. (125)

Not an easy task.

The bread crumbs that led out of the dark forest

Have been eaten by ravens and crows;

Even if you dropped lovely white stones

They’ve turned into toadstools. (131)

Still, what doesn’t change through the flow of constant loss, constant metamorphosis, is the perceiving self, that which both names (calls) and—especially—recalls.

Memories come as separate flashes, prone to deterioration and fading. The labor of remembering counters such a dispersive penchant, sewing together fragments that, left alone, would inevitably drift into oblivion. Both the metaphor of the quilt and the myth of Osiris are referenced throughout the collection.

Friendship quilt folded in the antique store

What never was meant for sale

White and blue pieced

Each square autographed

With the embroidered name

Of someone now gone.

No wonder, in this wide expanse

The heart turns to the invisible

Spirits that seem to animate

Our story. (20)

As a map collects into gestalt sparse realities that our body can only experience piecemeal——while moving through space, over time—a quilt connects fragments of clothing that belonged to various ages and locales. Each salvaged scrap stands for the missing whole, which revives through the assembling process. So the patchwork is both cartography and diary, archive. A survival device, as well…

Like the plains that stretch away

And can drive a woman mad

Unless she can piece them together (21)

Sewing and mending are mentioned more than once, but the poetry here evokes quilting also by its inherent structure. Sagan pays tribute to all those remnants—heirlooms, souvenirs, mementos, ephemera, ex-votos—that suggest times revolved, invisible narratives, distant worlds. They are randomly found and often come cluttered, jumbled up like fabric shreds in a ragbag, waiting to be reshaped. Both evocative and mysterious, charming and elusive, these relics cause a tug that we could call “longing,” although “aching” best describes what compels the poet to “see beyond the trace,” get a glimpse of what it stands for.

Try to break up

The visible… (94)

Some poems are mere lists of objects—or details of other sorts, a scent, a color, a gesture—juxtaposed in pointillistic fashion. Apparently unrelated, once assembled they build powerful narratives, draw vivid portraits, summon precise ambiances and moods.

These objects speak

Of the unseen meaning in the seen

Like the map drawn by the Mallorcan conversos

Africa in detail, outpost of red tents

South America clear, the North truncated

A map of territory unknown and known

The feeling tone of a place name

And the place—where you sip sweetened coffee

In the shade of some kind of acacia

And call it home. (101)

Descansos, also observed, belong to the same category of vestiges. Those shrines sprouted on sidewalks, or along the freeway, link a specific site to the event that happened there at some point, hence attempting to seal time into place. Fascinated, Sagan postulates a map of the sites where death or an accident didn’t occur, where our fate, unbeknownst to us, took a turn for the best—those monuments we never built.

So, the work of remembering—in order to map the lost—implies sustained care for details, especially if incomplete. It means keen awareness of the minute and sparse—be it a corner of street or a corner of vision, arcane petroglyph, predawn feeling, the aftermath of a dream. In the foreword, V.B. Price describes the collection as “full of details and intimacies,” also mentioning “the advice of Heraclitus to know a great many particulars if you want to find the truth.” Which inevitably calls for a Pasolini’s quote: “Only partiality is exhaustive.”

Each minutia the poet fondly, tenderly considers, speaks volumes. It becomes a magnifying lens digging into the depth of time, channeling other lives and other, distant places. History spontaneously breaks in. Vivid persona poems, triggered by landscapes, sites, or artifacts—artworks being, of course, a form of cartography, ekphrastic poems abound, and they are exquisite—smoothly intersect daily experience. The habit of reading traces braids generations, creates legacy, links the personal with the universal.

Various eras are visited in Map of the Lost, ages of Sagan’s life (childhood, teenage years, marriage, maternity), of her forebears, ancient Rome, Spanish conquest, settlement of the American West, World War II, prehistory, and myth. Those times breathe into each other. They form a pulsating unity, lightly stitched, loose, and flexible—her map of flesh and blood.

The mother/daughter relationship—sketched with light touches, but a constant throughout the book—is vital to the reflection on time, change, and identity. The dynamics between a parent and a same-gender, only child inevitably imply motifs of specularity, the awareness of cycles, a strong accent on mortality. Sagan always liked, she says, the myth of Persephone. Many poems refer to it in deep, moving ways, tackling both the theme of metamorphosis

I’ve moved from Proserpina to Ceres

From wild heedless girl

To the mother of one… (12)

and, more poignantly, the fear of losing one’s child (to the underworld, to the demons, to death).

After all, for whom does the poet write? Truly? Why would she put together the past, her life, all life, if not to consign it to her-who-will-survive?

There’s a pervasive playfulness in the poetry, and a delicate, mostly self-directed humor. Although loss—what is gone—is the subject matter, it is never addressed in a tragic tone. The main sentiment is a melancholy one, that which results from the blend of “beauty and decay.” It is the very feeling of the wanderer, the observant passerby, as the view of houses, gardens, front yards, porches always exude a quality of presence/absence. The lives of others are acutely sensed (through glimpses at the intimate, the domestic) but remain evasive (the sight is always partial, hence creating, as we said, the peculiar nostalgia evoked by things fleeting and fragmented).

Afternoon shadows across a fence of sticks

That keeps some things in, some out

And this street, which of all the streets in the neighborhood

Has a feeling of melancholy, and of half-kept secrets

As if its very narrowness

Were about to reveal something. (11)

Passerby? Yes. Either roaming familiar streets, returning to the East Coast of her origins or the San Francisco of her youth, visiting or simply imagining faraway places, the author of these poems conveys irresistible, quintessential transience. It is there since the first page, expressed by the image of the teen girls running, already “out of reach,” by the wish “to leave this place”—an impulse revealed or transpired in many other poems (“Pluto in Riverside,” which reflects on how small childhood myths look when revisited in adult age, or the poem about Ana Mendieta). Despite the anchoring pull of Santa Fe, Sagan writes from the perspective of a traveler/nomad.

And aren’t we all strangers

Wayfarers, pilgrims… (132)

 

The horizon, after all, is a construction

Both an illusion, and in its way

An idea you move towards. (118)

 

Even since my birth

I’ve been walking away from a tight place. (133)

 

Even I can’t explain

What brought me here (23)

 

I also was born somewhere

and went somewhere else, is this why finally

all the letters catch on fire? (45)

Where does this mood (this spirit) come from? Hard to say. The expanse of the unknown (the plains of the West for the quilt-making pioneers, the ocean crossed by the immigrants, the lands sought by the explorers) is the opposite of the map, and its generator. Perhaps the mapping purpose results from the impulse of “leaving this place” and implies, first of all, a wish to let go of the familiar to tread the uncharted, the wild.

Unless such a wish was a need, because there was no choice, and then became a legacy. A handful of poems trace Jewish/East European origins. Cryptically, and yet not so, the verse echoes pogroms, exile, diaspora, wanderings that seem etched into the DNA rather than fully conscious—hence, more powerful.

Born in an eastern place that can be broken

And will be— (60)

 

Rather some dot which defines us

Which has been erased. (63)

 

Dreams of golden fields

It is our border on the map that burns. (59)

 

Things have been set in motion that must resolve in flame.

Karma means cause and effect.

You wear this narrative like an heirloom locket. (62)

With this underlying premise, this hidden backbone, the “lost” takes yet other meanings. As an object, it could be the not-yet-found, the incognito we brave when bridges were burned behind us. As a subject, it could be the exiled, the expelled, she who has nowhere to return.

    Therefore, she starts building a world with what is at hand.

     Language, for instance—because, after all

Narrative itself is a kind of dwelling (37)

***

Language is a fundamental concern in Tom Laichas’ Three Hundreds Streets of Venice California—a collection of finely sculpted prose poems blending observation of nature and place, social analysis, history, and philosophy with the visionary and surreal.

While, for Sagan, language as a system of symbols helps to shape the evanescent, the fleeting, into lasting, meaningful patterns, Laichas takes us a step back, musing about how our definition of things inflects the way we perceive, situate, and connect them—their meaning, their function, their fate.

The opening epigraph, quoting Marlowe’s Faustus, clearly announces it. “Names make worlds.” In principio erat verbum. Language creates reality because it makes it cognizable.

Our reality. Is it the only one? And is it fixed, permanent? If/when it evolves, does language closely follow, or is there a gap between the two, even a hairline crack? The dialectic of sign/logo and entity/matter is one of the interstitial spaces where the poetry of this collection likes to dwell.

Forget names and the whole thing comes apart. You can’t walk from somewhere to nowhere. (7)

Here, the names in question are those of the streets, alleys, squares of Venice, the beach town west of L.A. where Laichas lives. The book sets to explore it, with an eye scanning the concrete (be it cement or leaf, seed or bullet, seagull or cigarette) and the other spelling the topographic nomenclature, reading it as a city-within-the-city, perhaps an aerial twin—letting the two maps (the physical and the verbal) mesh and interfere.

Three hundred grid-woven streets, stab-stitched to one another. (7)

If the stitching recalls Sagan’s metaphor of the quilt, the grid strikes me as a crucial keyword. It evokes a sense (an illusion?) of control, containment, which will be explored in depth, and the idea of a filter through which layers of meaning will percolate as the journey goes on.

A small town, named after a famous eponym. Not the only one… there’s also a Venice in Florida. Many cities, it turns out, are called the same way. The two American Venices, on the East and West Coasts, are

the same and not the same. Streets are the same and not the same. Familiar. Almost familiar. (18)

Though redundantly twined by the appellatives of streets and plazas, they somehow differ because language rules up to a certain point. Geography has a say—and flora, fauna, the weather… People worry about different hazards and react to them with opposing political stances. Still, people worry in both towns, and their main concerns are identical, which again makes us doubt—are there many cities, or is the town repeating? Is location so important? Is it, after all, a relative matter?

What about the Italian, Adriatic Venice? How does it come into play? Spread in the background like a blueprint, it allows the intrusion of history into the present.

the elder cities insinuate themselves within our façades. (22)

Comparison of the Serenissima with surfurbia provides opportunities for soft, subtle irony. It highlights the contrast between the official past that claims celebratory replay, and the vastness of what, no matter how you call the town, remains happily anonymous.

There are side streets and alleys so forgotten they are unnamed. I walk those streets in the daylight, alone and empty-handed.

 

Above is a white sky so vast I lose the sun in the sunlight. (22)

So, the poet walks the grid of Venice Beach in two ways—guided by the topography, a mental map, a mnemonic based on semantics

We do what we can. We knit a neural network. We synthesize a voice. We teach that voice our syllables, syntax, and stress. (8)

and sometimes without a guide

I leave the voice at home. I walk from street to street. Do I really need to know where I’m going? Does it matter if I get there? (8)

Is the map essential? Maybe not. Doubt about the value of signage (through humorous hints at its often disputable logic) lingers throughout. The discrepancy between the civilized/named/tame and the wild/unnamed is, again, a favorite vantage point.

How vital, for instance, is taxonomy? Apparently, it is and isn’t. Are the elms of Elm Street truly elms? They don’t look like it, but they are. Are Chinese elms, elms? We aren’t sure, as

Neighbors don’t call them elms. Neighbors call them street trees. (23)

In a small square, near the shore, full of behavior-dictating signage, a gull briskly takes flight.

I stay behind with the doll’s arm, the child’s garden, and the written rules. Without wings, I can’t get much further. (67)

And

To be honest, I don’t know if that tree really is a cypress.

 

But the tree doesn’t care. Like other living things, it answers to any name we give it. It shares its fragrance without asking. There, at least, is a saving grace. (70)

Sagan’s Santa Fe plays home base to the diffuse wanderings of her Map of the Lost. Laichas never physically leaves Venice Beach, but his meandering also forms loops. He establishes his home base on Washington Boulevard—the town’s East/West principal axis—to which it devotes seven poems, splitting the book into sections. After each tour on foot, with its harvest of both depths and ephemera, the poet reaches the main street and drives it from the sea (where it starts or ends) towards the border where Los Angeles proper begins. Hence, a motion that could otherwise appear circular, labyrinthine, acquires a definite sense of direction. It becomes a journey.

Humans throughout the book are—unlike streets—mostly anonymous neighbors. Only on Washington Boulevard, systematically, familiar figures appear. With the exception of a female remote ancestor, they are the poet’s male relatives—a long lineage of men, cousins, uncles, and Father, of course. Is it because the street is an “arterial road” that his bloodline so steadily flows along? Probably.

the vanished men of my family left home to drive streets like this. (33)

 

Through their memories I remember these men. Their ghosts watch for a trace of the past in the present (33)

Dante is mentioned in the first poem, and Susan Suntree, in her blurb, equates Laichas to a modern Virgil guiding us through Venice and beyond. I am under the impression, though, that Father plays Virgil to his son, being the leading force behind the traveling impetus, and the safety valve allowing access to the chasms of mortality and loss.

The father/son tie evokes the mother/daughter relationship found in Sagan, as they both convey a sense of cyclic continuity, and highlight how place—by preserving and triggering memories—interweaves generations and counters oblivion.

Father is recalled as always walking, riding, driving, in motion. Where did he and his kin men go? Why were they so restless? Some of the reasons transpire and are simple, work related. Some are implied, veiled. They might suggest the need to find anew something that was lost or removed—a home, a status, belonging. They suggest lifetimes of fatigue and patience. They hint at long distance—way, way longer than Washington Boulevard.

Unlike Laichas’ ancestors, the inhabitants of the Venice he treads are settled. Rather, still. Although he doesn’t know them—interactions are superficial, tangential among neighbors; they occur via social media rather than in person—the poet sees them quite well. The observation of the city’s life is a grid, we said, through which social commentary is sifted—therefore meted in small quantities, homogeneously distributed, and finely textured. It almost imperceptibly seeps in, permeating the text before we realize it. It self-formulates through punctual reflections on both urban features and human behavior. Small details are sufficient to highlight patterns of discrimination, reveal habits of prejudice, emphasize inequality—a police car gingerly patrolling the street, a chicken unwillingly disclosing hidden poverty.

Even at their sharpest, Laicha’s remarks are voiced with gentle irony. The bullet “grazing” a woman’s leg in the Whole Food Parking Lot domesticizes violence with a humorous twist on words. Sarcasm? Not even, and surely no judgment, no finger-pointing. Compassion, instead. After all, the human trait he most underlines is isolation. Insulation, which creates—rather than healthy solitude—a condition of lonesomeness. Early in the book, the poet notes the “absence of Christian fellow-feeling.” Love your neighbor? Obsessed with the idea of protection and self-defense (whatever has a door isn’t safe), this community is as friendly as a colony of anchorites. Paradoxically, “we learn what living here is like” not by visiting next door, making friends, helping and being helped, but by looking into empty houses staged by realtors.

Alien to each other and, of course, distrustful of visitors, Venice’s inhabitants are also weary of needed “others,” such as repair people. They don’t even have graveyards, preferring to obliterate their dead.

Outsiders, here for boardwalk and beach, don’t bother with Lucille, never walk that mile east.

 

Lucille won’t walk west to meet them. The avenue stays put, hoarding neighbors behind hedges. Though they are on the map, some streets do not exist for strangers. (46)

The same mindset births the arrogant claim of controlling nature, expressed through the phobia of the wild—messy jacaranda tree, all sorts of insects, a coyote, and, despite its magical beauty, a visiting peacock.

In “Carlton Wy,” the bird-feeding act performed by an old couple is a sterilized ritual. Man and woman have returned inside when the sparrow comes. They don’t see it and don’t care. Soon, they’ll move and just relocate their habit. They won’t care about the hungry bird that will seek nourishment in vain—because they won’t imagine, won’t know about it. By the way, the sparrow is equally oblivious, moved by instinct alone. Since it never met its patrons, it won’t realize they are gone. Here is a “nurturing” interaction occurring in parallel realities, never intersecting—just as, in “Venice Bl,” two terminally ill folks live parallel lives in adjacent flats, sealed apart as they synchronously proceed towards the finish line.

Flora and fauna—nature in general—need to be kept at bay in this “Instant City,” artificially built on alluvium. Something virtual, provisional, in the town’s make perhaps justifies the frailty causing it to self-shelter, self-siege. Venice is and isn’t a sea town, as there are no sailors, and the only fishing safely occurs from the pier. The ocean isn’t part of the urban life. Its intrusion is feared, as is that of the tree roots attacking the pavement from below.

On that day, the tipus of Coeur D’Alene will free themselves of every concrete encumbrance. They’ll break into classrooms and homes. They’ll march across Venice, an army of trunk and bough. (59)

Nature here (neighbors’ nightmare? poet’s dream?) takes revenge against civic claims. Careful. Upset by human hubris and eco-disregard, it can go further. What will happen when the rising sea engulfs the built environment—which is, after all, just as faultless as nature is? (But aren’t humans—these neighbors—innocent as well, because unaware, frail, essentially motivated by their fear of death? Yes. Hence the non-judgment. Hence the humor, the kindness).

Goodbye, streets. Like sideways sand crabs, we have a tidal surge to outrun. When we return, we will speak another language. Don’t expect us to remember you. We will forget it all. You’ll forget, too. You’ll drown, and then you’ll forget. (60)

In the lines above, despite both their topicality and futurism, we can’t help hearing echoes of past exoduses, immigration waves, pogroms, exiles that meant sudden abandonment of habitats, but especially suppression of memory.

Skillfully, the book embeds social critique in a slow crescendo, first mentioning ostracism towards plants, then animals, then towards signs of unwanted human presence (noise, graffiti), only later disclosing intolerance for the homeless, gentrification, racism, and the choral repulse for the “universal alien,” as shown in the murky portrait neighbors trace of a ghost aggressor—the embodiment of all their biases, combined.

When neighbors go ballistic about nocturnal noise from street kids, only an anonymous dweller, who has been at war, shows patience. He alone seems to keep a sense of proportions when it comes to threats versus disturbances. We wonder who he is.

Is this town peculiar? Or (back to the theme of language and reality, of relative identities), is the town repeating itself? The book doesn’t say. Perhaps there are nuances. As we walk these streets, as we glimpse at the people inhabiting them, hear scraps of what they say, and guess what they might think, we gather both a sense of humanity at large and the unique idiosyncrasies of this kerchief of land.

Let’s consider the eponym. Great Venezia, Laichas says, was a “normal” working-class bourg, then transformed into a perfumed elite myth. After all, Venetians invented the Ghetto. Maybe all communities run a similar course at different times. A past age is evoked when here, here, neighbors weren’t scared. They left the doors of their parked cars unlocked, so pedestrians could transit through their vehicles (entering from the passenger side, exiting from the driver’s) on stormy days, avoiding the flooded part of the lane near the curve. A striking, moving cameo.

Imagine.

And so these are the people, these are the mores from which sometimes a break is needed, and two things apparently occur. Often, Laichas’ wanderings lead him to the shore, where several streets dead-end. Right there, look, is the Santa Catalina Island. Like for Sagan, nature can be an anchor and give respite.

Blue and remote, it shares a horizon with the summer-setting moon. Watched for too long, both vanish behind clouds. It’s a fugitive’s habit. […]

 

Last night’s TV airs hate without interruption, even after I switch it off. […]

At sunrise I walk the mile between my bed and the ocean.

 

[…]

Not even the gulls speak.

 

To the south, that mountain. (26)

Though it might seem a mirage, it is real. Its quiet might well hush the reverberations of hate that we inhale all day through the news.

At the shore, the vastness of earth—reassuring—is more tangible than in town.

there’s no sharp horizon. (19)

 

There’s no visible horizon. (37)

 

there’s further, miles of further (32)

Here’s an edge that isn’t an end, but a sort of beginning—like for Sagan, the beginning of what can’t be mapped, and its very unnameableness is a kind of relief. In “26^th Pl,” police choppers survey the empty beach, as if the sand itself needed inspection.

In my city, solitude is like that: suspect and fugitive. (37)

Water, in general—even manmade canals—seems to highlight the contrast between the labeled/metered life of humans and the borderless pulse of nature

bridges arcing over small fish too quick in the water to name. (42)

 

We return home wishing we were born into that other life, that rarer life, that life as iridescent as the mallard’s green cheek. (42)

Untamed nature also counters the stern laws of erosion, decay, loss, with the constant regeneration of flora. Even if so much is gone, “so much lives on.”

The other break from the maze of fenced homes where people cocoon, we said, is the Boulevard, where the poet replaces his cohabitants’ fleeting company with that of darling ghosts and of the “otherselves”—alter egos, other him(s), the person(s) he was at different ages, here, on this very street. Here, more than anywhere else, he remembers—and his is the mythical remembering of Isis, resurrecting his earlier ages, allowing them to coexist with his present consciousness. Paradoxically, the otherselves invoked as companions (welcomed, because unavoidable) seem to both nurture identity, making it fuller, richer, and dissolve it—as if the overlapping of time, summoned by place, necessarily led to plurality, to a split of the individual into an (even limited) multitude.

I drive these strangelands. Ancestors and otherselves dream and remember. (33)

The overlapping of past owners of Laichas’ home is yet an example of the “we” summoned by the layering of time and place. Those subsequent lives melt into one—or else the poet’s self divides, multifaceted. Hence, remembering is the mandatory result of constant dismembering.

Sagan:

When I say “you” I mean the three persons of grammar:

Me, you, and everyone else (49)

In “Woodlawn Av,” Laichas quotes Smithson: “Buildings are ruins in reverse.” They are scraps of past waiting to coalesce. What does it mean? Somehow, the past explains the present, the ghosts feed the self, as if the vanishing point (where all things converge) were indeed the point of origin.

Otherselves and ancestors’ ghosts break the smooth, compact narrative surface, texturing it with the visionary and surreal. So does the built environment when it self-animates and speaks out. The urban landscape osmotically absorbs, then manifests the consciousness of its dwellers—though exuding a collective wisdom not found among the human singularities.

Finally the village walked for her, its mud sliding her forward and back. (20)

If sometimes streets have more wisdom/or/innocence than their residents, sometimes—on the contrary—their dull, mineral quality serves as a metaphor for people’s lack of empathy

On this block five years back, Oscar D— takes a bullet, bleeds out and dies.

[…]

Santa Clara Avenue knows nothing about it. Santa Clara is an object, a thing made of sand, gravel, and tar. It doesn’t know the quake of its own traffic or the weight of its own dead. […]

 

Maybe, somewhere on earth, there’s a city more fully alive to human feeling.

 

Not ours. Not yet. (50)

Not yet. But there is hope.