Applause, 11 by Carol Muske

What happens to that youthful formality of purpose? (I feel like I’m lost, do you? Listening to everyone applauding a play I missed.) Spring here in L.A. today, ninety or so, everything in bloom. I drive my four- year-old to preschool and turn off Santa Monica into a stakeout. Top-lit cop cars jacknifed onto lawns, a chopper churning the smog, an amplified voice: Give up while you can. Come out with your hands raised.

My kid doesn’t look up from her book, The Big Orange Splot.

All the hyper-tense police phrasing doesn’t phase her. I stare at a woman on the curb, solemnly applauding the police--as if this is a film set. Perhaps it is But who’s in that house? Finally, we’re allowed to pass, the choppers hang and sway. Who was in that house? I woke, wondering, today, and who’s in my life in this aftershock, L.A.?

From “Applause” (University of Pittsburgh Press: $16.95, cloth; $8.95, paper; 53 pp.). Muske, who lives in Los Angeles, is the author of several collections of poetry and, most recently, a novel, “Dear Digby” (Viking). (See review on Page 3.) The title poem of the collection, whose title is taken from a photographic exhibit by Holly Wright, has 12 parts of which the 11th is reproduced above. Carol Muske, 1989. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.