Don't hang around 7

There’s a quiet audacity in a portrait that refuses to give you a face, a head-and-shoulders silhouette turned slightly away against a tobacco-brown ground, wisps of hair dissolving at the crown like smoke, then the skull opens to a pale horizon of pink clouds and distant blue mountains, the San Gabriels after rain, the kind of view Angelenos catch only by accident, while below it the calm gives way to machinery, concentric rings like camera lenses or turbine housings, a spiraling vortex where an ear should be, chrome struts, rust-red triangles, oxblood fragments, scratched lines crossing the surface like a windshield after impact, and one small light glowing near the jaw like a porch lamp left on, the body thinning toward the bottom into streaks and grids, freeway traffic caught at seventy, yet the work never loses its composure, the bare gray shoulder and muted brown field holding the fragments in check, serene sky above, engine room below, memory rendered as infrastructure, and somehow the whole thing feels like Los Angeles thinking out loud, cars, screens, mountains always visible and always somewhere else, which brings me to the strangest dream I had last night, because there was someone standing beside me whom I couldn’t quite see, more absence than person, and somehow I knew not to ask what they were doing there, the scene felt strangely familiar, like arriving halfway through a conversation, and when I moved closer the figure turned just enough to make me stop and said, very calmly, “Don’t hang around,” not a threat, not even a warning exactly, more like the obvious thing to say, then everything around us began to smear and stretch, lights running into lines, the ground moving faster than it should, and I woke up with the odd certainty that I had been looking at a place I already knew, anyway, it felt like a Rauschenberg had a nightmare about the 405, want another coffee?