Descent Into Los Angeles Poem by Robert Dawson

Bobby Dawson's Descent into Los Angeles
with Mr Light Burden and Mr Smooth Promise

That boy's-book Pilgrim's Progress,
my Grandma Rose's goodbye gift in Iowa,
had me in tousled knickers on its frontispiece
hefting a bag of promises like candy on my back;
the Easy City at the gulf
of Thornless Hill suggested
a YMCA that encouraged masturbation, rows of bunks
for softy boys who spent their paper money.
Standing on the blanketed back seat
watching our wobbly, wall-eyed camp trailer
trundle after us through snowy cornfields,
I read till I heaved about my namesake.
Burma Shave Burma Shave Burma Shave Burma Shave
read the backs of signs as we inched down the map
into Kansas along inattentive highways.
We were cast in my father's autobiography, a man
who selflessly gave his family
the wrong start in life
by swarming over the Rockies into post-war California.
Cal li forn ya here I come I droned,
checking yardage through Oklahoma by the signs,
300 Miles to Tumbleweed Honey,
Last Chance to Buy Indian Blankets Before Texas,
Reptile Garden … snakes with antiseptic venom
And a blind shagless buffalo with ingrown hooves.
Crouching into the wind that was
the ghost of the buffalo nation
we tailgated
a Blue Star tandem belching white
through hornless deserts, smug
until we saw the line of cars tailgating us …


past melting pueblos, curtainless, the last
homely house before the defluent ridge. We floated
stomachs flopping
hairpinning
down
gorges specked with Fords with mattresses on their roofs
downshifting
weightless
sledding
gasless
along a spur
and breathless
through Needles
willlessly dropping to a
gnashing gear scattering
deadstandstill
on Wilshire Boulevard, talking to the traffic.
Disneyland was only its basement then, earthworks not yet
ready to advertise free tours for leukemiacs.
We pitched our trailer in Culver City -
miles from any city then;
across the freeway a black field
of oil derricks pumped like smudgy mosquitoes;
behind the court, where each plot nurtured
a wreath of poppies and a citrus mostly twigs,
acres of barrel cactus and century plant
insulated the flat façades of a movie ghost town.
Each morning my father
Matched his speed to the traffic and disappeared.