Manzanita
By John Keene (‘98, ’99,’01)

Every morning the cry of steel against steel grows
more bearable; the concrete walls increasingly harbor
color; the desert heat the herculean fans blow in begins
to break by afternoon. All these pink and brown faces,
once indistinct, have started to crystallize, and his accent,
freighted with country pitch, is steadily dimming. A few
of the men he supervises hardly suspect he's not a native.
At the whistle, he hurries out to his Essex Roadster, flying
past ribbons of red alders, eucalyptus along the roads curling
westward to the coast, where he rents a bachelor's bungalow.
A year into his stay, the Saturday midday glare off the hills
still feels unreal; the sand dissolving beneath his toes
at the Pacific's rim fills him with awe he can only partly
convey in letters home. He knows they are wondering
when he'll return, no longer a mere engineering graduate,
but skilled in building and running every kind of machine,
because jobs in plants abound across the city and Illinois.
How can he convince them he has fallen in love
with the nightscape of sleepy Los Angeles? How the music
of Spanish and Japanese, the barberry air, the acres of orange
groves and slow drives up to Santa Barbara are irreproducible
east of the Mississippi? Mostly, it is the lightness
with which he moves through days, as if winged,
Black and fearless, no need to pass or even consider it,
for few here appear so pained to see a man wear
his skin: here, he can enjoy it, like the tambourines
ringing and spoonbread at the AME church socials
he sometimes attends, or the banjo-playing on Central Avenue
that nightly stokes his dreams, till the alarm sings
and he steps out on his patio, his eyes adjusting to waves
unwrapping themselves upon the shore, not daring to imagine
the turns of fate or fortune that will force him to abandon this paradise.

Copyright © 2001, John Keene. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.