La Brea

By Glyn Maxwell b. 1962 Glyn Maxwell

Los Angeles. So just

guess what I saw: not the dust

or the wide jammed road, not that. And not

the park where enormous playthings eat

the shouting children. No, and the glass white

televised cathedral?—that

was a sight seen for the sin-

gle flashed moment, and gone.

I saw the tar-pits at La Brea,

where a dark endowed museum squats, and where

the thick blots of lake are watched,

and the haired replicas stroked and touched

by kiddies. There’s a tour:

the intelligible stone, the Short-Faced Bear,

the Dire Wolf, American Lion and Mastodon,

and Man with not much brain.

Well they did all make a dumb

choice that day! But my day was warm

and fascinating. Try to see these

tar-pits, in La Brea, in Los Angeles.

Source: The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Biography

Born in England to Welsh parents, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied both poetry and theater with Derek Walcott. This simultaneous training in two disciplines has enabled him to create innovative work across genres. Maxwell has written numerous verse plays as well as long narrative poems. The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse narrative set in a Manhattan bar a few days before . . .

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