I cannot tell you what a bargain this is. . . .
– “$7,500” Josephine Miles
I cannot lie and tell you what a bargain this is.
The owners paid top dollar, before the Great Housing Crash:
Six hundred thousand and a bit more,
In love with mature roses and orange trees.
This listing stands solidly in the middle of its cul-de-sac.
The roof soars over a sun room addition in back.
The front door, painted an oceanic blue, beckons–
Morning sun turns its leaded glass window into a prism.
From beyond the back patio, you can hear
Pilings being driven in the distance:
A heart beat that comes to abrupt starts and stops,
A community on its way to a halting recovery.
Published in: The Café Review, vol. 24, Spring 2013.
Mid-Century Ranch, Orange County fails to capture the colloquial voice so powerful in Josephine Miles’ persona poems. Yet as I look over my drafts, the first on lined yellow legal paper, it’s easy to see I made a move in that direction while clinging tightly to lyrical language. In form, I left behind the standard left-justified, five-line stanza that started with. The final silhouette is more like that of her "$7,500."
Unlike the new construction in Miles’ work, specific details about the location, plants, and front door are meant to invite the reader/potential buyer to come closer. This house bears the economic history of the real estate crash of the 1980’s. It depreciated after the owners purchased it. The speaker attempts to divert our attention from economics to aesthetics and hope. (What couldn’t be foreseen at the time is how the value would recover. Today that home is worth over a million dollars.)
The poem is part of the manuscript Floating Eye, born out of my longing for northern California, as I attempted to acclimate to greater Los Angeles. Many of the poems were written in relationship to Josephine Miles' work, which I had discovered in a used volume of her collected poems at Pegasus Books on Solano Avenue. There are one-to-one correlations in a number of poems, as is the case with Mid-Century Ranch, Orange County and "$7,500,"—as I attempted to compare my late twentieth century southern California to her northern one.
Though Miles lived in southern California when young, she spent most of her life in the East Bay, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Her life during those turbulent time resonated with campus unrest, police actions, and the murder of a fellow professor by a student. The problems of urban development, social unrest, and environmental destruction found there about are still part of our landscape. The slant with which she approached the world kept me going back to the poems to understand the deeper levels within them.
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