A heavy grey weather heaves
in from the ocean
and mottles the exposed limbs
of the Beautiful Women.
Most have lank blonde hair
and are not beautiful.
They appear to disdain
themselves
but a small tightening around
the mouth
gives away their lifelong
desire to be visible.
Among the Money Men in suits,
older,
handsome: my husband in a red
silk tie.
He's an old hand, signs in,
skims the script;
we wait in the crowded noisy
room where gossip
greetings stories rub off
some of the boredom.
The burning aftertaste in the
air is car exhaust
and the intimate not
unfriendly appraisal
of competitors. The
Bartenders, humorous and
big-bellied, hang around each
other:
everyone here has their own
fellowship.
The Young Guys are scruffy;
the one who books the job
will be quirky,
an oddball, not look like an
actor.
One lumpish boy reads The
Count of Monte Cristo;
another, wry and congenial,
works the room.
The casting director's small
dog
is going everywhere, sniffing
everyone;
he's over-eager, anxious,
possibly pathological:
almost too iconic to
introduce here,
like the shriveled orange
mouths
of the Birds of Paradise that
spike and die
against the stained stucco of
apartment buildings.
After an hour, my husband
auditions
with a Young Guy and two
Beautiful Women,
and we're freed into the cold
and damp;
it's five o'clock and clouds
are still jamming
the sun. With grey skies,
this town's
flash and dash get soggy, and
it's easy to feel
that we're all sliding toward
the restless edge
of ambition, the continent's
cluttered drawer
being emptied into the ocean.
That tipping motion gives me
vertigo,
I say to my husband as we're
driving back
to the Valley. I tell him
that I think
the tall and tatty banana
trees are sad,
the jabbering boulevards are
dislocating,
the renters in the stucco
must be ghosts.
The Beautiful Women weren't
beautiful!
He understands, but he's been
in the business
for thirty-five years and
knows L.A.
He points out a momentary
slash of light on the hills
—the chaparral turning
gold—and slips neatly
into the one lane still
moving over Sepulveda Pass.
Four of Reeves Keyworth's poems won Honorable Mention in the 2001
Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and were published in the Fall/Winter 2001
issue of Nimrod. These poems
were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A selection of her poems was a
finalist in the 2003 Chapbook Competition sponsored by the Center for
Book Arts. She has work forthcoming in Chelsea
75.