The Darkening Trapeze

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.