Mass Migration of the Homeless  (Excerpt from Fish, Soap, and Bonds)

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They packed up their tents and their cardboard boxes and everything they owned, all now and all at once, and they began to move. They put their things in shopping carts and in backpacks and in anything else mobile and nothing else changed except they were on a march. The dirt brown smog still blocked the San Gabriel Mountains and there was of course still no way to see the sea.

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“Who said for us to go?”

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“It is time to go.”

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Later, no one could say where those voices came from.

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Yet no one ceased to follow the sourceless command.

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Dare is an awkward word, one destined to ambiguity and the ash heap. Doubt fares better. Nonetheless doubt in complete abeyance causes stirrings still.

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At each step something was left behind: a shoe, a blanket, a memento mori, gravestones at Old Granary. Samuel Sewall is my hero.

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From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust is no more than the 1st Law of Thermodynamics and vice versa.

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But the shopping carts continue to roll.

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The Army of the Ragged crosses Central Avenue and soon approaches Main, barricades at the gates, barbarians hard to find.

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The trucks full of immigrants dispatched to gather back the stolen shopping carts meet resistance around Broadway and have no choice but to turn around.

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The dreadlocked blonde girl is cuter than most. We stop along the route, pause along the pathway.

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“What prompted this march?” I ask stiffly.

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Through one bend of earshot and through the same refraction of the honeybee’s eye, she says, “We must move on.”

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Another listen, ears bent 90 degrees, and she says, “I don’t know.”

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Either way, the caravan approaches Main Street.

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People are drinking Veuve Cliquot at Pete’s Café. The widow watches warily.

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Time stops.

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The LAPD intervenes.

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But there is no time to go home, no turning back.

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Godel is triumphant.

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The parking meters are full of remnants, stuffed with memorabilia.

Soon to be capped, the contents captured for all time.

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The migrants do not get to Flower Street, let alone Figueroa. They magically turn up at MacArthur Park.

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Shopping carts are unpacked, tents are reassembled.

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Police presence vacates as the sun sets, officers off to greener pastures.

We de-camp.

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Clara Bow dances at the Park Pavilion.

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We fuck in the dark hotel. Nobody’s paid the electric bill, nor for running water. Darkness is so romantic, candlelight hard to find. Moonlight is scarce. Her thighs are so pale they shine.

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Nothing changes.

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Little changes.

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Everything changes.

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The tent I pitch is not my own.

*

Though not studied by Darwin to my knowledge, crows are said to be the smartest birds. I rarely fear the ravens that gather on the electric wires and perch on the telephone lines. O’Casey’s crows steal hen-house eggs with impunity. Is it blue or rose, Picasso’s “Woman with a Crow” of 1904? Or right in between? Crows crack open nuts using traffic, deploying signals — stop, go, walk, don’t walk. This in Sendai, Japan. While across a thousand seas, Betty bends a wire. Not to mention New Caledonia.

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Gleb returns home, to Dasha, but all is gone, all has changed, everything gone to shit. Livestock roam the streets, factories barren, most men dead, all life ravaged. I want to live in Pleasant Colony. I know what I am talking about, dammit!

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