Crucifix In A Deathhand - Analysis

A land held, not held dear

This poem’s central claim is that Southern California—specifically the Los Angeles basin—feels like a place you can occupy but never truly possess, because it has been handled too many times: bought, subdivided, argued over, and spiritually squeezed dry. Bukowski opens with a deliberately strange geography: starch mountains that begin out in a willow, mountains that keep going without regard for things as mismatched as pumas and nectarines. That blend of the wild and the grocery-sweet is the poem’s signature: nature and consumption jammed into one landscape. Even the mountains become domestic and slightly comic, like / an old woman with a bad memory carrying a shopping basket, as if the very land has been reduced to a forgetful shopper.

Once the speaker names the setting—We are in a basin—the poem drops into human history and human damage. The land is punched-in, cuffed-out, divided, and the most violent image arrives: it is held like a crucifix in a death-hand. That simile makes ownership feel like a clenched grip around something sacred, not reverent but terminal. Even when the wars long over, the holding continues through paperwork and planning: real estaters, subdividers, landlords, / freeway engineers arguing. The tone here is bitterly observational—less a rant than a tired inventory of who gets to squeeze the place next.

The outsider’s fact: it’s theirs, and you’re passing through

The poem sharpens its sting with a simple contradiction: This is their land, and yet the speaker says, I walk on it, live on it a little while. That little while matters. It’s not just mortality; it’s tenancy, transience, and the feeling that the city’s real proprietors are systems and transactions. Even the reference to near Hollywood doesn’t glamourize anything. Instead, it frames a kind of cultural exhaustion: young men in rooms / listening to glazed recordings, followed immediately by old men sick of music, sick of everything. Culture becomes something sealed and shiny (glazed), then something nauseating.

Out of that exhaustion comes one of the poem’s darkest, plainest thoughts: death like suicide can be sometimes voluntary. The line doesn’t beg for sympathy or deliver a moral; it sits there like a fact you notice while walking a city. It also introduces a tense idea: if land can be taken and retaken, perhaps a person tries to claim one last piece of agency by choosing when to leave.

The hinge: from Grand Central Market to the merciless green bars

The poem turns on the speaker’s advice to himself—how to get your hold on the land here. The answer isn’t a deed; it’s a route. First: return to the Grand Central Market and see the old Mexican women arguing with young Japanese clerks. The scene is vivid and oddly tender. The clerks are witty, knowledgeable and golden, and the produce rises into a small secular cathedral: oranges, apples / avocados and more, described with an appetite so strong it becomes fantasy—as if you could eat them all and then light a cigar to smoke away the bad world. For a moment, the land seems reclaimable through smell, color, and simple purchasing power: food as a way of forgiving a city.

Then the poem snaps: Then it’s best to go back to the bars. The bars are wooden, stale, merciless, and insistently green. The policeman who walks through is scared and looking for trouble, which captures the poem’s view of authority: jittery, hungry, not protective. The beer is still bad, with an edge that already mixes with vomit / and decay. The earlier abundance of fruit and vegetables does not cure anything; it just makes the rot more visible by contrast. This hinge is the poem’s emotional engine: hope of sensory relief immediately undercut by the city’s entrenched sourness.

The shopping bag: comfort, shame, and the work of not-seeing

The most intimate tension in the poem sits between the speaker’s shopping bag and what he must ignore to carry it. He says you’ve got to be strong / in the shadows to ignore the taste and smell of corruption, but he goes further: you must ignore the poor and to ignore yourself. That doubling is brutal. Ignoring the poor is a social sin; ignoring yourself is a spiritual one. Yet the poem doesn’t pretend this is rare. The bag between your legs is almost comically physical, heavy with avocados and / oranges and fresh fish and wine bottles. It’s the day’s proof that you can still get something good here. But it’s also a kind of ballast that keeps you complicit.

Even the line who needs / a Fort Lauderdale winter? reads like a defensive joke—half pride, half self-mockery. The speaker insists you don’t need an easier paradise, and yet the insistence betrays the pressure of the place he’s defending. The poem makes Los Angeles feel like a city where pleasure is always purchased under fluorescent light and carried past despair.

Memory’s last betrayal: the whore, the warmer sun, and the missing old men

In the final section, the poem shifts again—from present routine into a memory that feels both lurid and oddly delicate: 25 years ago there was a whore with a film over one eye who made little silver bells from cigarette tinfoil. The details are specific enough to feel true, but the speaker immediately questions his own nostalgia: The sun seemed warmer then, though probably not / true. That quick self-correction matters because it keeps the poem honest: the past may not have been better, but it had people in it who are now gone—or at least no longer visible to him.

That disappearance becomes the closing ache. He walks outside and the green beer hangs just above your stomach like a short and shameful shawl. The bar’s stain turns into clothing, something you wear without wanting to be seen in it. And then, in the last line, the poem quietly detonates: you look around and no longer / see any old men. After all the talk of land changing hands, what finally hits is that time has taken a whole class of witnesses. The basin isn’t just subdivided; it’s being emptied of the people who could remember what it used to be.

A sharper question the poem leaves you with

If to get your hold on this place requires both the market’s abundance and the bar’s numbness, what kind of hold is that? The poem’s logic suggests it might not be holding the land at all, but holding yourself together long enough to carry the bag, swallow the green beer, and pretend you didn’t notice who disappeared.