In the title poem of his latest collection, “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” Dana Gioia (b. 1950) turns his deep feeling for Los Angeles, the city of his birth, to a memento mori — a contemplation of the death of himself and his old friends. Readers of the Sun will recall Mr. Gioia’s “Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels,” appearing last May, which poses a lament for a beloved city: a city that appears, in that poem, as an American Jerusalem in desolation. In today’s Poem of the Day, the Los Angeles scene becomes a meeting in the underworld of an equally beloved jazz club. As it happens, the club remains open to this day, but the setting Mr. Gioia envisions is located firmly in “the summer of ‘71, / When all of our friends were young and immortal.”  

When Mr. Gioia reads the poem aloud, he emphasizes his love and affinity for the West Coast jazz that, in their youth, he and these departed friends had thronged to hear at the Lighthouse and other clubs. Author of opera libretti and of art-song cycles, Mr. Gioia has also collaborated with jazz musicians, notably the pianist and composer Helen Sung, to set many of these Los Angeles poems as songs. In “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” whose loosely metered lines seem to float on the air like jazz riffs, the living speaker mixes with dead friends, aware all the while that he too will soon go home to that “dim subdivision,” where the good doctor at the gate enforces the dawn curfew. Soon enough, death will have closed out everyone’s tab.