Chapter 4
Poem number four of 30 American Poems by Various. California City Landscape by Carl Sandberg. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Reading by Matt Perard. California City Landscape. On a mountainside the real estate agents put up signs marking the city lots to be sold there. A man whose father and mother were Irish ran a goat farm halfway down the mountain. He drove a covered wagon years
ago, understood how to handle a rifle, shot grouse, buffalo, Indians in a single year, and now was raising goats around a shanty down at the foot of the mountain. Two Japanese families had flower farms. A man and a woman were in rows of sweet peas picking the pink and white flowers to put in baskets and take to the Los Angeles market. They were clean as what they handled there in the morning sun,
the big people, and the baby faces. Across the road, high on another mountain, stood a house saying, I am it, the commanding house. There was the home of a motion picture director famous for lavish whorehouse interiors, clothes ransacked from the latest designs for women, and the combats of male against female. The mountain, the scenery, the layout of the landscape, and the peace of
the morning sun as it happened. The miles of houses pocketed in the valley beyond. It was all worth looking at, worth wondering about. How long it might last, how young it might be. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain.
