by Larry Levis
He said. He had intended
To move on after a few months, but then…. He was
Drinking a Coke, & resting.
“What’s in the coffins,” she asked him, “when, you know …
You open them up?”
He looked at her briefly, “Just hair,” he answered,
“Just miles & miles of hair.”
If the soul is just the story that it tells, then
Did his answer, his smile,
The way he took his comb out of his back pocket
And slicked his hair back,
Spite the soul with something like the soul?
And who really gives a shit?
Except those who, like children who hope the story
Never ends, & gather
To watch a fermented body pouring from a chalice,
Or the boy who wished
To stay awake forever, & who, with matches & a spoon,
After a while found a way
To do just that. They found him, face white & thin,
Almost, as a communion host,
Dead in a little swanboat in the park, one foot dangling
In the water of the pond.
My account of him is not a cautionary tale. As far
As I’m concerned, he made it.
I could feel Death in that space where Booth, who was,
As far as anyone can tell,
A space himself, or avenging angel, or absence, planned
The assassination with two friends.
And so what if I could? The drunk was talking soundlessly
And the traffic went on
Overhead. I rubbed my hand across my eyes as if
To free them from what
Fettered them like a hawk’s in a king’s hand
And when I opened them
A second later, the drunk was gone. The king was dead.
I could see the nothing in
The space it ruled. Beside it there a small plaque
Almost illegible, commemorating
The wrong thing, the recruitment of soldiers, sailors,
Shiftless drunks, debtors,
Guys out of work, who fought the War of 1812, & then
The Mexican War, & then …
But after that, the meadows turned to blood. What
Happened after that was genocide.
The Self sounds like a guy raking leaves
Off his walk. It sounds like the scrape of the rake.
The soul is just a story the scraping tells.
The Self has no story. It is a sound. It scrapes
Against all things. He lets the rake do all
The talking now, the raked walk keeps the stars
From blowing out in the night sky
Above his house. It isn’t music that he hears:
The sore screech of the wheel in the addict’s voice,
Who, having kicked it, becomes the quiet shape
The shadow of his body makes. A rhythm
Only, 2/4 time, without a melody, the flesh
A lighter gray around the scar the stitches left.
Sore screech of the wheel that never rests,
Thin girl at her loom. Thin girl at her loom.
IDLE COMPANION
for Eric Walker & Abby Wolf
I thought I caught
A glimpse of it once
In a woman’s nakedness,
Her shoulders in sunlight.
What was it that seemed
To gaze back at me,
And then was not there?
And didn’t I hear it?
Wasn’t that one scream
A complete stranger’s cry,
Different from all the others
In the wailing of a madhouse?
It was. And then it wasn’t.
But the wailing continued.
And soon it was impossible
To pick out that one
Cry from any other.
My hard-headed brunette
Pulls on a sweater,
And the roads are covered in mist.
And really the asylum
Was more often quiet
Than not. Even their wailing,
After a little while,
Was really a quiet in which
I could hear a janitor work
At a scuff mark on the floor.
And a nakedness that seemed
Familiar, then was not?
And some loony’s aria
Drowned out by the whisper
Of steel wool on tiles?
Everything became different
By staying just the same.
My life has no witness
When I whisper to myself
“No, nothing there,”
Casting the flashlight over
The black drift of trees,
And the blacker, drifting sky,
And it’s no good saying
That whoever it was
Is now only the nothing
The screen door cries out once
Behind me as it closes,
And then is quiet again,
The nothing that must dwell,
So idly, in its shriek.
And the tear in the screen
I never repaired,
And a run in her stockings
I noticed, once, in winter,
And the wake of a boat
Slowly closing over itself
And spreading, spreading
Into pines & silence.
Each thing’s like another,
But not like it enough:
The shriek of the screen door
Unwilling to become
Either the madhouse wailing
Or the madhouse quiet
In the morning just after.
And the light still falling
Onto her shoulders in that
Moment when already
I was turning away,
Distracted by what
I cannot even remember,
A light seen just once,
Though it must have been
Flooding each object
In that room—keys,
Some change & our clothes
Strewn where we had
Left them the night before,
And two movie tickets,
Torn in half as usual,
That grow stranger & stranger
In the picture I have of them—
Two bits of paper
In a pale, & then even
A paler shade of green
Tossed onto a black sill
So many years ago—
That in this moment I find
Myself unwilling to do
Anything but gaze at them there—
Idle companion who stares
Into shop windows late,
Shuffler through rain & leaves,
And present though no one calls,
Are you what’s twisted beneath
That lame girl on the porch,
Who reads beside the faint hymn
Of seven flies clustering
Over her bowl of overcast
Soup gone cold by now?
Or are you the sunlight on all
The roads when no one’s there?
Or are you both, & neither one?
Unshakable companion,
The one friend left within
When all the others go,
And the only one I know
To be criminally sane,
Soul, what is your name?
ELEGY FOR THE INFINITE WRAPPED IN TINFOIL
His face itself a motionless white flame—
Serene three days now in the rear window of a bus
And still wide awake from half a gram of crystal—
The boy who set his girlfriend’s house on fire
Said later in a threadbare accent with the sound
Of wind & the scrape of rusting metal in it
To the cop in Wheeling, “Didn’t burn no nothi
n’,
I jus’ walked a spell.” In truth he felt he glided
There alone past eaves & lawns that flowed
Beside him then as if he’d loosened them
From every mooring but brimming moonlight
And the scent of ashes, a male smell overwhelming
All other blossoming of rose that wasn’t his.
The mute porches & the dimming fireflies
Trapped in a bottle on a sill were things
He would not need in Florida …
And the syllables of Florida were like a fire.
Like the flicking of a girl’s tongue inside his ear,
And they sounded like a fire when it caught
Its breath from shingles soaked in kerosene,
Like the flames’ long kiss on door & windowframe
That grew the flame & the hunger of the flame …
He listens to the rain’s staccato ceasing
On the tin roofs of the prison farm. He likes
Fire. He likes to think of fire. It is pure,
He thinks, & innocent, & it is like him
In the implacable fluent rising of its body,
Today, he is a flame. Yesterday,
He was also a flame, & the day before.
And the day before & the day before that.
III
A HOTEL ON FIRE
THE NECESSARY ANGEL
1.
Buddy you got no idea how fast it happens,
The tail gunner said to no one in particular,
And flicked the gunsight up with his index finger.
A moment later he turned to a wet rose
Blossoming all at once & too large
For the glassed-in hothouse turret to explain—
The bombardier still telling him a joke
Over the now quiet, frozen intercom.
The next day they fired on & sank
A harmless fishing junk with bleaching sails.
The one flag still believed in after the war,
Unfurling a lasting insult to a neighbor,
Was the index finger. Who christened it? When?
Half my country still believed in witches
The day they tricked the atom with a mirror.
And the sad whorl of flesh above the knuckle
Looks back at me as if to say the body
Is another’s body, & the dark’s within the dark.
2.
So the girl who received a whipping with a birch cane
In the schoolroom in front of all the others there,
Who witnessed in the passing weeks the bruises
Turn yellow & rose, until her flesh resembled
The random patterns blooming on late peaches—
Peaches & Cream is what the others called her,
Taunting her—is now a woman who watches, dry-eyed,
Above the cramped kitchen sink of a house trailer,
The way the wind whips the weeds in a vacant lot,
The way it blows trash against the chain-link fence
Along the interstate. She is just watching it get darker,
The dark seeming to spill out of the dark, out of what
Is already dark. She moves her hips forward until
They touch the sink, withdraws them slowly, pushes them
Close again. Some enchanted fuckin’ evening, she says,
A moment or two later. She sticks her tongue out
At the dark. She begins chopping things up for a salad.
Buddy you got no idea how dark it is, the blood swears
Against the glass. She hears the light hissing above her
In the kitchen, & thinks she may well be the witch
They said she was. A power without a switch to turn
It on. The birch cane falling through the autumn light
Of the classroom, the switch that left her in the dark.
The switch that can’t explain her life, or why she’s poor
And white in all this dark. It’s 1952.
White Trash—that’s what all her neighbors call her.
White Trash—the sprawl of a wave on a rock is all
That’s left within the words when I say them slowly now.
She isn’t in them anymore. And whenever she appears
It’s 1952 & she is making dinner.
This is before the country enters history. This is before
The president is fast-forwarded out of his own blood—
Lifted & dropped like a sheet of paper in the wind—
Into the front seat of the white limousine. Wide awake.
If you still the frame the president looks wide awake.
Like the woman in the kitchen of her trailer making
Salad, her script for Benzedrine refilled, the bottle of it
On the counter there. Wide awake in 1952,
And as the dark filled the field outside she’d masturbate
With a cucumber, then slice it up & serve it to
Her husband in his salad. She’d watch him douse it
In Thousand Island dressing & wash it down with bourbon
While she smoked—she wasn’t hungry—across from him
At the table. It was the moment of the day
She waited for, the wind hissing outside the trailer,
Her husband still in uniform. Then she would switch
The cigarette to her left hand, reach between her thighs
With her right, & slowly unfurl her index finger.
It stood right up to him in the wordless dark beneath
The table. Death & Resurrection & the dark we are.
3.
And against the dark? The lobby’s polished brass,
The bright light of a hotel barber shop, & a music
In a chair, his mind on nothing. Beyond the window,
Is Hartford in a downpour & a fallen world where,
Every Tuesday afternoon for twelve years,
My hill witch does Wallace Stevens’ nails while he reads
The New York Times. Sometimes it’s Bergson or
Santayana, the book folded into the newspaper so it looks
As if he’s reading the paper, & sometimes it’s the paper,
And at least twice each time he visits Stevens
Finds himself staring at her breasts
That rise & fall to the quickened rhythm of her breath.
He feels her warm breath on his fingernails
As she polishes them. He watches her & he thinks
Of the clouds slowly changing shape in the night sky
Of Florida, & knows if he reaches out, & touches her,
Touches the swelling cotton fabric of her sweater,
He will begin the long fall that culminates
In a commonplace of wave sprawl & a coastline
Filling with service stations, taco stands, motels,
A screen door banging endlessly in the wind.
And Oh he wants to! The desire has less to do with her
Than with a wish to fall & keep falling silently.
Out of the world. All it requires is this slight gesture,
His index finger uncurling like a thought
Made flesh to taste the withering cold to come.
She could feel him watching her.
And said to herself, as she dusted his nails & blew
Hot little breaths on each one of them,
“So you wanna floor show with your manicure.”
The next time she undid a button on her blouse,
Stopped filing for a second, & looked into his eyes …
He couldn’t work for a week. He waited for a warm,
Overcast afternoon in March before he tried to touch her,
And waited for his body to open like a parachute.
She was buffing the pink fingernails
Of his right hand when he discovered that his left
Index finger would not move. He tried again, & found
He could not move any muscle. He stare
d
At the swimming print of the paper on his lap
And saw instead the wave sprawl on the rock
And the beach growing colder, emptier than
The sound it held. Then he was falling toward it
In the dark. “It’s all right, it’ll be all right,” he heard
A voice saying. It was like the voice of a mother
In the night, the calm in its wake a widening, spiraling
Calm, like the pattern in a carpet he remembered,
Like a voice from childhood whispering in his ear,
The calm voice of a woman in a quiet house,
A voice he knew, a voice he had always known.
It was embarrassing to wake & find it was
The voice of a woman whispering in his ear,
To find he’d fainted in the shop while she
Was giving him a manicure, & to find her touch
On his face was gentler than the remembered
Touch of his wife, or mother, or any other touch,
That it was like the night air of Florida, incorporeal,
The finally dissolving pattern of a final heaven.
4.
After that, the men who fell & were found frozen
In ditches, their parachutes spreading around them
Like picnic blankets, were much like the men he saw
Strolling behind lawnmowers in the summer dark.
Lights came on in houses & the stars came out.
All of it seemed a part of what was uneventful,
A part of all there was that went on falling
Into a silence that seemed to enter everything
Or else had been there all along without their knowing.
They felt its presence in the gauzy, late afternoon
Light falling through the windows of the lobby. As he
Read the paper, as she went on filing his nails—
The silence of the empty barber’s chair next to them,
The silence of jars on a shelf & magazines in a rack—
Was neither the clothing of things nor the nakedness
Of things. It wasn’t this. It wasn’t that. It was
The blank, the the that set the whole a-spin.
He would begin to doze off, his hand in hers,
And the sound of the nail file was the sound of his steps
Racing over the dry beach grass on a winter day
As if he were still a boy one step ahead of the quiet …
But where the quiet overtakes him everything
Is changed: her breasts awaken to his touch
Only to disappear into this cold air in his palms.
And if streams unthaw, if the lazy gauze
