Decades ago, I came across an article in the L.A. Times about several Southern California poets which contained samples of their writing. I do not know if I still have that article. Therefore, I cannot give writer credit or even titles to the lines I recall below. Perhaps someone can find them on the Internet, though I have tried unsuccessfully, so far.
The first was a one-line poem about the Watts ghetto:
"Every plant that comes here dies."
The second is a line from a poem about Los Angeles itself:
"She loved me loose and large in the afternoon,
all out of proportion."
Both lines of poetry have stuck with me over the decades like the Philip Levine poem, three decades ago.
When I was at the Academy and was buying a home for the first time, I was drawn to a brand new development on Cimmeron Hills in Colorado Springs. One house in particular I could not resist. You could see Pikes Peak even from the basement window. After I moved in, I noticed a women had moved into the house directly below mine. One afternoon she was sitting on her patio with a gray Scotty dog at her side. Later, at a meet and greet gathering for the English Department to introduce us five new instructors, that same woman came up to me and introduced herself as my new neighbor.
I later learned that Gina was lesbian, as well as a new English instructor like me, and she had selected her house as far away as possible from the Academy for privacy. She was distressed to learn that I was her neighbor until she eventually figured out that I was gay.
It was a rough assignment for both of us, what with my forced resignation. She also had problems with members of the department who gave her a less-than-stellar evaluation. She left the Academy after only three years by mutual consent, and she and I also had a falling out for several reasons that no longer seem important.
The afternoon of the day I resigned, she and her mother, who was visiting, took me to dinner at a local restaurant to help me forget my situation for a couple of hours at least. While I was still living in Colorado Springs, she returned with her partner and we had dinner at a different restaurant several years later and talked about old times.
She was the one who told me that two other women in the English Department were lesbian. She also told me when they hired a guy who was a real flamer to replace me for the next academic year. When I moved, we lost contact. She likely retired from the Air Force two decades ago.
The reason I think of her is that I once told her, because of her continuous trouble with growing house plants, that she should have that one poem about plants made into a plaque and installed above her front door. She was always having them die on her. Of course, the plants in the poem are a metaphor for those human beings who live in the ghetto and do not thrive. But, for her, literally, her house plants had a rough time and a low survival rate under her roof.
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