Your patio was for parties, a cement slab with a corrugated pea green
roof, later embellished with Sears bar and grill, stereophonic sound,

mutable track lighting and surrounded on three sides by blooming
jacaranda and bougainvillea, for this was post-war Los Angeles,

and the patios were stepping out, flushed with money and liquor,
the melodies of jazz, then British Rock—a state set for jaunty cravats

and diaphanous shirts that would look out over the lush, though not quite
Bel-Air space between a prosperous, but still working-class neighborhood

and the National Cemetery, where identical white tombstones stretched
like shuttered dominos with the cold, soulless efficiency your revelers

were trying to forget here on the patio—the price of one war paid,
another coming for painters, directors, shrinks and anesthesiologists…

all immigrants bundled in victory amid the warm Mediterranean air,
where despite misalignments of marriage and career—the generalized

anguish that kept the depressants flowing—there was a sweetness to
this surcharged nation woven from yarns that crossed like rats on boats…

affection in stray moments of this massive quinceañera, perfumed as it
was by the fumes of a nearby freeway and the balm of the hidden stars.