STATE LINES
Elena Karina Byrne’s “Palm Springs, Pale as a Church Candle” presents the Southern California landscape as holy. This portrayal begins with the title and carries to the not-so-final line, where the disappearing horizon is described as a “nun’s habit.” But I think Byrne aims to express something other than religious feeling. Her cinematic sweep from image to image is composed with such devotion, such a resolute eye, it’s hard not to read these lines as a love poem. The “you,” ostensibly departing Los Angeles for Palm Springs, is the object of Byrne’s desire. Though the traveled freeway creates a fraught distance between the lovers, the last line, trailing into ellipses, suggests their story isn’t over.
Palm Springs, Pale as a Church Candle
tipping its scales, imaginary gun in your hand, your back turned, the road rising up, mirage-black from the blacktop and you can’t see sundown where you’re going fast away to wake up in the horsehair bed over the edge of the canyon, and you can’t see over the tequila-wood steering wheel now small in this distance until the hot road brings the water call as if desert mountains fall, bad politics, last cowboy cactus, and you drive and drive, drive away from the spit-shining and lizard skin, every church rock thrown centuries ago for long shore and holy smell of her, ghost in a town of ghost-gods driven till your cowboy hat flattened under the pillow, until you ran the hills and in through the shifting sand shale ghosthouse fields as giant white windmills would ache and cut, ache over your head that is now one starving coyote running, and is now a nun’s habit horizon disappearing as you near...
— for Darrell Larson “Palm Springs, Pale as a Church Candle” appears with the permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Elena Karina Byrne is the author of “Squander,” “Masque” and “The Flammable Bird.” She lives in Los Angeles.
David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin Lit: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.