Wilshire Boulevard
between Ogden and Curson
a plain looking pond.
an angry mammoth mired in the tar
trumpeting to his calf and cow
who wait. endlessly.
they're all fiberglass....models.
a life-size tableau
a Pleistocene, Disneyland, scene.
But the tar still lurks below the water.
Our asphalt; our ass's fault
starts fifty feet away.
Pretty people in convertibles
cruising down the boulevard
headed for Santa Monica....
A nice liberal town, by the way.
In the visitors' center: Pit 91
a Christmas fruitcake mass
of jumbled bones in asphalt,
a million of them.
The scientists say ten large mammals
every thirty years for thirty thousand years,
that's ten times thirty times thirty....
forget the math, it comes out to
about a million sporadic tragedies.
Not counting all the little ones.
That leaves a lot space between,
for lives well spent as dire wolves and camels
giant sloths or saber tooted cats.
A glass walled laboratory
where the work goes on,
solvents and dental picks, brushes
gently freeing the fossils from the matrix.
stained dark brown,
chocolate coated animal crackers
made by lab-coated candy knackers
The Tongva, the first people
sealed boats and baskets here
nice, and watertight.
They're mostly gone,
but there is a mountain in Glendale named Tongva Peak.
That's how we remember the people that we kill:
Put their name on a place:
Topanga, Pacoima, Cucamonga,
like that.
Look:
where the tar is oozing, see the tiny flies?
They eat petroleum.
Just like us.
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