levelheaded: If Only To Wake When Night

Merry Christmas, dear readers. We have a real fun one for you this week.

In “If Only To Wake When Night” Alexis Orgera takes us through a drive in mad hot southern California. It is the dry, tough Mojave desert but there’s also something quiet about it. It is a place where one “inherit[s] the desert’s hot breath.” Notice the word-choice: not suffer or break under “the desert’s hot breath” but merely “inherit”—feels natural, as if accepting the setting as it is. There’s also a “parched sandpit ” but it is of no consequence, no one is trapped just yet. It is a soft depiction, like an afterthought that fades before it gets anywhere, broken by the dash that ends the line.

In the second stanza the general “you” suddenly turns into an “I.” The speaker is “looking for relevance,” perhaps wanting to be important or meaningful. “I” is needed in this world if the world “needs fire trails.” Are fire trails any good, here in the desert, or is the speaker being cynical? If taken literally, the term almost sounds magical: a trail of fire rather than a trail used to extinguish fire. As specific and concrete as a fire trail may be, the image as a whole is abstract. The speaker “[holds] hands with a world” but we can’t tell what kind of relationship the two share.

Another sudden transformation follows: “I was in a new kind of desert,” the speaker says, introducing us to the Santa Ana winds. These winds are known for their role in creating fires. They’re also usually hot winds but sometimes cold. Plus, there’s a “latte” in this image. So we think of the weather: isn’t it too hot for a latte? Or is it a cold desert night (think of the title)? Or are we in the car driving (see first line) with the AC on, drinking coffee, safe from all winds until a window is opened and our shoulders are “lick[ed] down” to the point of “laughter”?

Here’s what we have so far: the Mojave, the Santa Anas, a latte, fire trails. Very particular subjects. But the juxtapositions are not particular, and not obvious at all. The place of “you” and “I” and the consequence of their situation are left open. The landscape is clear: hot desert of sandpits. But the word choices speak abstractions: “inherit” the heat, a speaker searching for “relevance,” a setting of “a new kind of desert.” These abstractions leave room for imagination, which is necessary in this barren landscape. And they also leave room for the interpretation of the atmosphere. It is, above all, a poem of atmosphere. The pleasure it offers is of personal associations: it delivers the images with detail, but doesn’t confine the reader to a single connotation.

Now for the main course: “A city-desert is a nightmare world, / a Sahara sprawled in every direction / with stucco, brick, Spanish tile, sheet metal, glass, […]” Coming from the Mojave,  we must be arriving at the City of Angels, yes? From this point on each stanza is a piece of a portrait of the city. This quoted stanza introduces the portrait with the same nature of description: specific yet abstract. It is a “nightmare world” but doesn’t sound like one. Stucco, brick, metal and glass are instead the new and the old, the versatility of the city’s look and feel. The “Sahara sprawled”—also brings up the sprawling city, to which LA is probably the archetype. Having a negative connotation usually, the sprawl isn’t exactly a celebration of urban lore. But it doesn’t sound like a “nightmare” either. A vast city surrounded by a vast desert, made out of diverse materials physically and culturally. These descriptions make up a rich atmosphere and complex cityscape, open to interpretation.

Here are some of our interpretations of the poem’s scenery:

“playhouses in the hills”—Beverly Hills and the huge studio warehouses beyond? Or the houses in the hills of Mulholland Drive and their eeriness?

“women wear gauzy numbers […] and men hide / their bald heads in Dodgers caps.”—The Venice Beach scene? Santa Monica? Hollywood Boulevard crowd?

“the sky is a starless / fixed bluescreen”—the view from Griffith Park or a shot at Bill Gates?

Two more anecdotes before we go. The “city never sleeps” isn’t your usual fun-all-night statement. Instead there are helicopters hovering, perhaps chasing some criminal or exposing some other mischief, but then again not a disturbing image either; it’s just what it is, sort of exciting if you wish, like a tattoo of “ten thousand lamps / of sand along my arms.” Or like a simile of a night depicted as a saguaro flower, out of which the poet takes the poem’s title, not calling the poem “a city that never sleeps” or “LA of my youth” or “the flower in the Mojave desert” (cheesy!) but rather the open-minded, abstracted condition, “If Only To Wake When Night,” stripped of the “’s” that leads to the flower.

Last one: “if the desert were a woman / she’d want to whistle a tune to herself / (you know what they say about a whistling woman)”—No, we don’t! That’s why the poem’s so fun. Or some of us might have a guess of what whistling women stand for, but there’s no way to know for sure. Such construction adds up to a poetic atmosphere instead of a single-minded assertion. We can linger inside the poem and think about what it means. Or, we can let its magic affect us passively, and continue on the road to visit the magical “pancake rock layers”—beautiful? Wild? Lonesome? Either way—sounds delicious!

– The Editors

P.S. Maybe she’s whistling this.  Check out those moves!