The following piece is an excerpt from Glenn Bach’s Atlas, a long poem about place and our (mis)understanding of the world. Atlas began in 2003 as a sound art project, but has since evolved into an open-ended long poem.
When was the last burn,
the instinctual contraction
of things coming to a close,
the walls closing in?
Consumed by the artifice
of this course of events,
the cinematography of the day
shifting between the hundred
different greens slaked
across the blades.
Tiny leaves respond,
bricks betray the dark
of night melt, of the spines
along the desert floor.
No seasons, they say,
but an eternal sun
after a rain and before the wind,
this idea of Los Angeles sifted
through the particulates of a million
moons, purple tinged
with the gold of El Dorado,
the light we all came for.
