by Larry Levis
Of vegetation comes back along the street, it finds
She isn’t there, that she is air & fire & absence.
The file sounds like the gate scraping shut behind him.
And the world tinged in frost. It glitters in the sun.
He is surprised to find he’s already walking past
What has become the illegible. In its raw light,
Where the eyes of the poor are like flaking paint,
Where an expressionless boy with a headband leans
On the crumpled fender of a car, & spits once
As he passes, there is no other sign—only the marquee,
Flashing, half-lit, on the motel beneath the overpass.
In the room the headboard of the bed shakes
From the ceaseless traffic passing overhead,
His things in a little jar in the bathroom tremble
And tinkle constantly. He does not understand why,
When he reaches out to test how firm the peaches are,
The store clerk in a white apron threatens him
With a baseball bat. And all of it happens in silence.
The color of the apron seems to change each time
The clerk raises the bat in both hands, changes
Like a remembered beach that was now in sunlight,
Now in the shadow of clouds—all there is left
Of the picked-over, looted, empty attic of heaven.
What was the worm doing there, at heaven’s gate?
But now it had eaten Heaven, now the light along
The coast was real, & was light. Now there was nothing,
Nothing but the empty, stretching arm of the beach
Beneath the empty clouds. It was up to him to put it
Back together, & he thought he might begin now
With the wave sprawl on the rock & the tern’s cry.
Outside, the scent of exhaust, the smell of baking
Bread, seemed more familiar now than the smell
Of sex, that sudden garlic overwhelming the dry
Lilac that had become the body of his wife.
The hymen of his soul parted as he walked
For traffic, for the rain changing back again to snow.
And the home he enters is not his home although
A doily on a sofa seems the perfect expression
Of a perfect quiet except … it isn’t there. He’d taken
Those exuberant, tasteless fantails of a distant aunt
And thrown them in the trash bin years ago …
He looks again & hears her saying, “It’ll be all right,”
He sees that the doily isn’t there, sees that the only
Embroidery is invisible, is what the quiet
Is making within the stillness of the study.
He hears his wife’s step, then the creak of her chair
Above him. She is reading there in her room or sewing
Something. She is there. And she is not there.
He closes his eyes a moment & sees a rock,
And then the sprawl of a wave against the rock,
And then the gleaming rock again, & he feels afraid.
Had the woman creaking in the chair above him
Become a rock & the sprawl of a wave against
The rock? Had she become the terns’ cries
As they gathered once, just once, into a tight,
Converging knot above the surf that just
As suddenly undid itself, & was not, was gone
Like the drying froth the wave left as it receded,
Like the windblown sparks of a fire on a beach
That left him walking there alone in winter?
He hears the creaking of her chair on the floor above—
What will he say of them? Her step, the creaking
Of her chair is asking, asking, asking: it is defiant.
He bends his head a little as if he is listening
To the wood grain in his desk turn into music.
But the grain in the wood is silent & the boy is dead.
And the sad whorls of flesh, or wood swirl of the knuckle
Above the forefinger, thumb, & middle finger that hold on
Tight to the pen, Swan or Waterman, for the carnival ride,
Hesitate a second at the top of the rickety scaffold—
At the top of the Wild Worm he can smell the sea—
Before the steep drop, the rush through the summer air,
On which is written, “It is an illusion that we ever lived.”
It is what the wave sprawl on the rock said & the boy
Who was dead. What is not written anywhere is what
Was said in the moment after—said finally & once
To the bare breasts of the woman kneeling there,
To the manicurist herself chewing gum on the bus
As she goes home to her small apartment, living alone,
The lights of the city glittering in the snowy air;
Said so that it can never be unsaid, by the creaking
Of his wife’s chair, by the ironic scraping of limbs
Against a wall, until the two sounds are all there is—
Filling the house with their brief & thoughtless triumph.
POEM ENDING WITH A HOTEL ON FIRE
Poor means knowing the trees couldn’t care less
Whether you carve the initials of your enemies
All over the trunk’s white bark,
Or whether this sleep beneath them is your last.
In the contorted figures meant to represent their sleep,
The statistics never show the deep shade in the park,
The mother appearing in the dark of someone within whose
Sprawled arms clear gin & black tar mingle
To compose the blood’s unwritable psalm.
The blackening church bells say the poor are wrong,
So does the traffic stalling on the bridge; so does the lazy swirl
Of current underneath it all, a smile fading in the dark.
What I love is the way you would whisper against
The current, into the dark,
“But what you mean by poor is … some figure & concealment
By which they are forgotten. But the figure itself is a kind
Of poverty. I don’t mean just … money. I mean poverty
In the widest possible … sense.” There was the sound
Of crickets in a ravine I listened to so closely one evening
It became only a vast chirring, then a thing not there, then
The roar of a fire. It was like being, or pretending to be,
Without speech. To be without speech means no one
Listening, & that the flames scaling the neighborhood like mirrors
Cannot even pretend to. This is
Where the poor are not permitted to see themselves,
This is why money mirrors nothing so accurately it tempts us
To seek our reflections in the passing, leafy idyll
Of a water so toxic by now it would scald you if it were
Real—for what is engraved upon it still represents
A wilderness—or a flash of a green silence almost alive
In the palm of your hand—that stands for one. And what
Secessionist keeps whispering in your ear? And whose
Eye, removed from a human face, stares from a pyramid
Like a bicep’s inscrutable tattoo? And what mansion floats
in its mosses & a landscaping so thick you cannot pick out
The slave, snoring or dead, or holding a towel to his head
Where an ear had been, in the shade of the willow there?
Once in a hotel in Cincinnati, I saw a woman decorated,
Like a kind of human Christmas tree, in money. All down
the buttons of her blouse & in fact all over her blouse & skirt,
The men, for whom, I heard later, she had been hired as
A private dancer, had pinned twent
ies, hundreds, fifties,
Rolls of smaller bills—& as the alarm blared its one note &
The beige smoke—billowy, calm signature of whoever had set
The upper floors on fire—began filling
The corridor, we arrived at the elevator in the same
Moment, & waited—I in shorts & a faded T-shirt with three
Naked Jamaicans on it who were, once, The Itals,
And she in the most expensive dress I had ever seen—
And when the elevator didn’t show we ran down the steel & concrete
Stairs that seemed to ring & ring with our steps.
Later, in the lobby bar, her purse so stuffed with bills
The bartender simply said, “It’s cool,” & raised both hands
Above his head when we tried to pay, she would talk only
Of her one obsession, which had nothing to do with money nor
Swaying to music, nor men,
But with purebred Abyssinian cats, the trouble she went to,
Taking them—traveling with four howling cages behind her
In the back of a station wagon—to shows all over
The Midwest. The worst part though, she said, was that
The shows were rigged, the judges were paid off—
So every winner—she had exhaustively researched all this,
She told me—every winner descended from families that had arrived
On the Mayflower, & did I know
Most of America was in the control of people who spent whole
Afternoons “daydreaming, running combs through these Siamese
And long-haired Persians fat as sofa pillows?” “No kidding,”
I said. And did I read about how they’d tried
To frame her in Chicago …? “Do I look capable of Murder One?”
She turned to me, the glint in her eye revealing nothing.
“No,” I said, “But what about Murder Two? Isn’t that just …
The same thing done with a lot more feeling?”
In her laughter you could hear leaves scraping the cold streets.
If you listened for it. If you listened hard enough.
The fire in the hotel had begun as nothing more
Than the prank of a child who’d gotten high, after school,
By inhaling gasoline fumes in a vacant lot, & who then rode,
With a gas can carried in a paper bag, the elevator to
The Starlight Terrace restaurant where he looked beyond
Frayed tablecloths & over the entire city before a waiter
Picked him up by his long hair & shoved him into an open
Elevator in which falling solitude the boy
Splashed gasoline all over the fake wood paneling & plaid
Carpet, stepped out of it two floors later, & then, with that
Quick & graceful turning gesture from which the body makes
The thoughtless beauty of a hook shot from mid-court, tossed
A match inside before the door could close. And though it took
The fire crew less than an hour to clear two floors & put the last
Sparks out, I kept thinking of the elevator descending to some
Small family probably in from the sticks, probably on their way to visit
A dying aunt or sister, who, after blowing all their savings to stay
In a room decorated with the overcast melancholy of a cheap
Utrillo print, waited there in the fatigued aftertaste
Failure left them with, as if to think it over, in that moment
When the doors opened onto flames.
In the photographs she showed me the Abyssinians looked
Emaciated, &, though I couldn’t say why, like a species that
Had survived its own extinction. Their pale eyes suggested
Nothing at all. They looked back like the face of famine,
Their thin, ridged spines older than even the ancient
Illustrations of cats on tombs, cats that had been the pets
Of kings & now slept beside them in the straitjacketed,
Dry, whirlpool of bandages they had wrapped kings in so that
They might descend without distractions. Did the doors
Of tombs open onto flames? The faces of the cats
Caught in the photographs would never tell.
Their gray fur was like blurred print or the blank, chirring
Blizzard on the TV set above the bar. Nothing would tell.
Once in a blizzard in a foreign city, having lost my way,
I wondered what it would be like to be one of those—blind
Drunk, high, or homeless—who would have no alternative except
To freeze to death, & thought how, after the initiation of pain,
They say it is like being lulled to sleep, the way the snow
Appears to faint as it swirls in the locked doorways of shops,
The way this would be the last thing that appeared to you
There, before whatever was left of you became gradually
Confused with a small part of the upsway
Of snow & wind.
It is all a matter of confusing yourself with something else:
The soul curls up in a doorway, & lets the snow swirl around it.
And … not just money then, but … poverty, I thought, in the widest
Possible … sense of the term, would
Be…. But then I knew what it would be.
For a moment I could hear the cats howling in their steel cages,
Their thin spines turning in circles.
Tattoo on a forearm & shriek of the wind, & no figure drawn
In the night’s silent contemplation by which
The poor might be forgotten;
And not you beside me in the dark but only a dry fern & a bible
In the room, the rain beginning its long descent onto the roof—
Its sound the chirring of crickets in a ravine.
I could almost hear … no, I could only imagine hearing it. And that
Is what it has become:
Having to imagine, having to imagine everything,
In detail, & without end.
IV
THE CONDITION OF PITY IN OUR TIME
ELEGY WITH A DARKENING TRAPEZE INSIDE IT
The idea turned out to be no more than a cart wheel
Stuck in mud, & unturned fields spreading to the horizon while
Two guys in a tavern went on drinking tsuica & recalling their one
Accomplishment in life—the seduction of a virgin on the blank
Pedestal of a statue where Stalin had once stood.
The State is an old man’s withered arm.
The only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx.
You can tell by the last letter of his name,
Which has the shape & frail balance of an overturned cross
On a windswept hillside. It marked the end of things.
Of lumber that rots & falls. The czar is a shattered teacup,
The trouble with a good idea is that it has to work:
The only surviving son of Jesus Christ survives now
Mostly in English departments & untended graves.
One thing he said I still remember, a thing that’s never there
When I try to look it up, was: “Sex should be no more important …
Than a glass of water.” It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing
Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.
The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him
Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became
A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves.
My colleague Otto Fick, who twenty years ago
Wrote brilliant lectures on the air, sometimes
Would pause & seem to consult notes left
On a podium, & then resume. A student once
Went up after class to look at them & fou
nd
Only a blank sheet of paper. Nothing there.
“In theory, I believe in Marx. In fact, my wife
Has to go in next week for another
Biopsy. Fact is disbelief. One day it swells up
In front of you, the sky, the sunlight on everything,
Traffic, kids on surfboards waiting for the next
Big set off San Onofre. It’s all still there … just
There for someone else, not for you.” This is what
My friend Otto told me as we drove to work.
I worked with men in vineyards once who were paid
In wages thin as water, cash that evaporated & rose like heat.
They lived in rows of makeshift sheds the owner hauled
Into an orchard too old to bother picking anymore,
And where, at dusk, a visible rushing hunger
Raced along the limbs of the trees surrounding them.
Their kids would watch it happen until a whole tree would seem
To vanish under it. There were so many of them.
By then the rats were flying over a sickening trapeze of leaves
And the tree would darken suddenly. It would look like brown water
Rushing silently & spreading everywhere
Before it got dark anyway & the kids went in.
“There was more rats in there than there was beads on all the rosaries of the dead.
We wen’ to confession all the time then ’cause we thought we might disappear
Under them trees. There was a bruja in the camp but we dint go to her no more.
She couldn’t predict nothing. And she’d always cry when you asked her questions,”
A woman said who had stayed there for a while.
Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:
Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way
Her scuffed shoes looked in the pale light,
How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed
For thirty years without complaining once about it,
How she might have done things differently. But didn’t.
How it is too late to change things now. How it isn’t.
COL TEMPO
The body is not above mockery:
Even one who has failed grows hungry.
The woman in the painting’s blind & wears
A sign around her neck. You never entirely forget
The gray sheen, like steel, of the cataract
Covering the one eye that remains open.
