Nothing in this poem is ever actually explained. The speaker opens with a promise, "Here is a gesture. It will explain / what I mean to tell you," and then spends six stanzas pointing: up at the palm tops, down the face of the buildings, down again to a wig shop. When the opening line returns at the very end, its second half has been cut off: "Here is a gesture. It will explain." The explanation never arrives. The poem's argument is that Hollywood can't be told, only looked at, and that the looking is where the meaning lives.
The form supports this. A pantoum is built from repetition, with lines from one stanza handed on to the next, and the last stanza traditionally returns to lines from the first. Newberry follows the pattern loosely, and the looseness matters. "What I mean to tell you" slides into "What I mean to tell you is look." "Where somebody/nobody lives" and "Let each of your eyes slide down" are passed forward almost word for word. Then the chain frays in the fourth stanza, where the sentence tumbles on ("What I want / you to see is the brazen way summer // comes to Los Angeles"), as if the speaker's excitement has outrun the form. There is no end rhyme. The repeated lines do that work instead, and they feel like the eye circling back to the same spots. The closing stanza gathers the bald mannequin, the palm trees and the wig shop into one last loop, then trails off with an ellipsis: "You'll feel the people…"
The most interesting phrase is "somebody/nobody." The slash refuses to choose. The windows hold people who might be somebody or nobody, and in a town built on fame the two words sit uncomfortably close. The bald mannequin "on stage" makes the same point in an object. It is a head waiting for an identity, standing beside a wig shop where identities are sold. Hollywood appears here as a place of costume and display, where a person can be put on like a hairpiece. The speaker's commands, "Watch," "Let," "Stare," "Feel," never say this outright. They only steer our eyes to it.
Then the poem turns to the street, and the imagery gets stranger and more physical. People pass each other, and what we feel is the space between them: "the breezes in the spaces between them / will batter you a little." Connection is replaced by gaps. Summer, by contrast, is a person with no doubts. It arrives "confident, brash," and the poem sounds out that attitude with hard b's: *bald*, *batter*, *breezes*, *between*, *brazen*, *brash*. "Brazen" has the word brass hiding inside it, which fits the next image, "the colors of molten metals running together." The heat and glare turn the city into liquid metal. Then comes the quiet, slightly unsettling line "tourists running with those colors." The tourists, who came to look, dissolve into the spectacle and become part of the glare. The people being watched and the people watching blur together.
That blurring is why the poem works. Its speaker seems to be a guide, but she gives no tour and no facts. She gives a way of seeing, with the eye moving from palm tops (the postcard Los Angeles) down through glass to the wigs and the empty-headed mannequin. The title suggests the poem is pinned to a particular corner of Hollywood, but the corner matters less than the habit of attention it teaches. The pantoum's looping repetition also suits a subject like this, because the city's surfaces repeat too: the same palms, the same windows, the same faces that might belong to somebody or nobody.
What makes the poem memorable is its refusal to resolve. The final line promises an explanation and leaves us holding only the gesture. A reader might be frustrated by that, but the poem seems to want us to be, because the missing explanation is the point. Whatever "somebody/nobody" means, we have to look at the street and decide for ourselves.