Clifton Snider, Watts Towers (poem)

Watts Towers 22 June 2006 Here where violence spread like flaming oil in the sixties, where neat little houses stand moated with crenelated white grilled fences and today ranchero music wafts in the summer air, I come to see them for the first time, Rodia's immigrant monument to Italy: welded metal, cemented tile shards, glass, three towers, medieval and modern individual, phallic, crafted like a gusher of praise in the paradise of the New World. Visiting the Cave of Pech-Merle Children are impatient. They fidget, they chatter, they squirm along the barrier bars. Their parents restrain them. One thinks of Disney: bear hollows, stalactite droppings, stalagmite cylindrical mounds, remarkable white phalluses. Electric lights create shadows, highlight heights, sharp contrast of gold, brown, red, black, white, concrete steps, stones, rails. Then the Chapelle des Mammouths. No 20th-century entertainer would have thought to etch these mammoth, these oxen, bison, horses, to paint them in charcoal, to mark a mammoth in bold red strokes of ferric oxide, irregular lines, of red that signify--what? The cave would have been worth seeing for its natural beauty alone, a stupendous oyster whose floor creates calcite pearls to this day, and a top spun around such a pearl in a miracle of calcium carbonate spun in a waterlogged hole. Turn off the lights and you get dense dark, stuff of nightmares. Turn them on--enchantment. A Zen-like miniature antelope and a hand outlined in red. Red dots along the right cascade like drops that form pearls & dripstones. Outline of a bear's head etched in stone, bear claws in deep parallel lines, linear manmade shapes that mean--what? Now the guide, a young woman, points her red laser beam at what anyone would have missed had she not done so. On a rock above us and way out of reach: the outline of a skull--or a man's head-- his body drawn lightly as a child would draw it, and spear-like projectiles wounding him as if he were a sacrifice, a wounded healer or a priest. Now surprise startles me, though I expected it: my first glimpse of the spotted horses: the shape of the rock is the shape of a horse's head, yet the artist chose to paint his horse's head into a fine stylized terminus and to make black dots surround the mane and the slopes of the body, the body itself dotted as well like the horse facing opposite, both punctuated with red dots that signify-- what? These are not horses one would ride, unless, transcendent, one leaves one's body and enters a spirit realm, for these are dots of desire to see what's on the other side, beyond the wall. To see is to know. Here spirit has legs, sacred, to gallop into healing regions. Six hand prints--outlines of hands in black--surround as if to signify-- what? "I made this"? Or is it we? And one of the children, silent now, stretches out his hand to connect to ancestors seven thousand generations ago; just a few years younger than the adolescent boy who left his footprints on the muddy floor, this boy child will not forget Pech-Merle, nor the live oak root penetrating into the cave, twelve meters to the floor, the solid floor.