Larry Levis

My father once broke a man’s hand Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first Two fingers, so it could slash Horizontally, & with surprising grace, Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand, And, for a moment, the light held still On those vines. When it was over, My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always, Lay alone in the dark, listening to music. He never mentioned it. I never understood how anyone could risk his life, Then listen to Vivaldi. Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night, And stare through the wet branches of an oak In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars Again. A thin haze of them, shining And persisting. It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them. In California, that light was closer. In a California no one will ever see again, My father is beginning to die. Something Inside him is slowly taking back Every word it ever gave him. Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father Search for a lost syllable as if it might Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now, The word for it, he is ashamed . . . If you can think of the mind as a place continually Visited, a whole city placed behind The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end— As when the lights go off, one by one, In a hotel at night, until at last All of the travelers will be asleep, or until Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk Is applying more lacquer to her nails, You can almost believe that the elevator, As it ascends, must open upon starlight. I stand out on the street, & do not go in. That was our agreement, at my birth. And for years I believed That what went unsaid between us became empty, And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted. I got it all wrong. I wound up believing in words the way a scientist Believes in carbon, after death. Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind, The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again— Which may be all that’s left of you & me. When I left home at seventeen, I left for good. That pale haze of stars goes on & on, Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape On a black sky. It means everything It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold. Cold enough to reconcile Even a father, even a son.

First Architect of the jungle & Author of pastel slums, Patron Saint of rust, You have become too famous to be read. I let the book fall behind me until it becomes A book again. Cloth, thread, & the infinite wood. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. In the future, everyone, simply everyone, Will be hung in effigy. The crepe paper in the high school gym will be Black & pink & feathery, Rainbow trout & a dog’s tongue. In effigy. This, For example, was written in memory of ... But of whom? Brecht gasping for air in the street? Truman dancing alone with his daughter? Goodbye, little century. Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots From one side of  the street to the other, Trying to find its way Out of  the parade. Forgive me for saluting you With a hand still cold, sweating, And resembling, as I hold it up & a heavy sleep Fills it, the body of someone Curled in sleep as the procession passes. Excuse me, but at the end of our complete belief, Which is what you required of us, don’t we deserve A good belly laugh? Don’t we deserve A shout in the street? And this confetti on which our history is being written, Smaller & smaller, less clear every moment, And subject to endless revision? Under the circumstances, & because It can imagine no other life, doesn’t the hand, Held up there for hours, Deserve it? No?No hunh? No.

“Prince Jesus, crush those bastards ...” —Francois Villon, Grand Testament It is the unremarkable that will last, As in Brueghel’s camouflage, where the wren’s withheld, While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are they other birds?) Are busily unraveling eyelashes & pupils From sunburned thieves outstretched on scaffolds, Their last vision obscured by wings, then broken, entered. I cannot tell whether their blood spurts, or just spills, Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered. The twittering they hear is the final trespass. ~ And all later luxuries—the half-dressed neighbor couple Shouting insults at each other just beyond Her bra on a cluttered windowsill, then ceasing it when A door was slammed to emphasize, like trouble, The quiet flowing into things then, spreading its wake From the child’s toy left out on a lawn To the broken treatise of jet-trails drifting above—seem Keel scrapes on the shores of some enlarging mistake, A wrong so wide no one can speak of it now in the town That once had seemed, like its supporting factories That manufactured poems & weaponry, Like such a good idea. And wasn’t it everyone’s? Wasn’t the sad pleasure of assembly lines a replica Of the wren’s perfect, camouflaged self-sufficiency, And of its refusal even to be pretty, Surviving in a plumage dull enough to blend in with A hemline of smoke, sky, & a serene indifference? ~ The dead wren I found on a gravel drive One morning, all beige above and off-white Underneath, the body lighter, no more than a vacant tent Of oily feathers stretched, blent, & lacquered shut Against the world—was a world I couldn’t touch. And in its skull a snow of lice had set up such An altar, the congregation spreading from the tongue To round, bare sills that had been its eyes, I let It drop, my hand changed for a moment By a thing so common it was never once distracted from The nothing all wrens meant, the one feather on the road. No feeding in the wake of cavalry or kings changed it. Even in the end it swerved away, & made the abrupt Riddle all things come to seem ... irrelevant: The tucked claws clutched emptiness like a stick. And if Death whispered as always in the language of curling Leaves, or a later one that makes us stranger, “Don’t you come near me motherfucker”; If the tang of metal in slang made the New World fertile, Still ... as they resumed their quarrel in the quiet air, I could hear the species cheep in what they said ... Until their voices rose. Until the sound of a slap erased A world, & the woman, in a music stripped of all prayer, Began sobbing, & the man become bystander cried O Jesus. In the sky, the first stars were already faint And timeless, but what could they matter to that boy, blent To no choir, who saw at last the clean wings of indifferent Hunger, & despair? Around him the other petty thieves, With arms outstretched, & eyes pecked out by birds, reclined, Fastened forever to scaffolds which gradually would cover An Empire’s hills & line its roads as far As anyone escaping in a cart could see, his swerving mind On the dark brimming up in everything, the reins Going slack in his hand as the cart slows, & stops, And the horse sees its own breath go out Onto the cold air, & gazes after the off-white plume, And seems amazed by it, by its breath, by everything. But the man slumped behind it, dangling a lost nail Between his lips, only stares at the swishing tail, At each white breath going out, thinning, & then vanishing, For he has grown tired of amazing things.

All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures. 2. And this evening in the garden I find the winter inside a snail shell, rigid and cool, a little stubborn temple, its one visitor gone. 3. If there were messages or signs, I might hear now a voice tell me to walk forever, to ask the mold for pardon, and one by one I would hear out my sins, hear they are not important—that I am part of this rain drumming its long fingers, and of the roadside stone refusing to blink, and of the coyote nailed to the fence with its long grin. And when there are no messages the dead lie still— their hands crossed so strangely like knives and forks after supper. 4. I stay up late listening. My feet tap the floor, they begin a tiny dance which will outlive me. They turn away from this poem. It is almost Spring.

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years. Outside the vineyards vanished under rain, And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang Their lost songs:Amapola; La Paloma; Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess, Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own. Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish. I hated high school then, & on weekends drove A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone. Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing, And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then. I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings, The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind Of solitude the world usually allows Only to kings & criminals who are extinct, Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin Each autumn, & made that little hell of days— The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs. The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared. And the girls I tried to talk to after class Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed, With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment. Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road. A life like that? It seemed to go on forever— Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend. And then the first ice hung like spider lattices Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One, And then the first dark entering the trees— And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner, The way they always seemed afraid of something, And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street Was brightly lit, the opossum would take A few steps forward, then back away from the breath Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars Would approach, as if to help it somehow. It would lift its black lips & show them The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors, Teeth that went all the way back beyond The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could Sever it completely from the wrist in forty. There was nothing to be done for it. Someone Or other probably called the LAPD, who then Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered Together his pole with a noose on the end, A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

What I remember is a carhop on Pico hurrying Toward a blue Chevy, A crucifix dangling from its rearview mirror That jiggled as the driver brushed A revolver against it, in passing, before tucking it Behind his back & beginning to joke with her. What I remember Is the smooth arc the gun made & the way Jesus shimmied to the rhythm. • Someday I’ll go back to the place depicted By the painting, boarded over by the layers of paint And abandoned, And beneath the pastel yellows I’ll find The Bayside Motel & the little room With the thin, rumpled coverlet, And sit down, drinking nothing but the night air By the window, & wait for her to finish Dressing, one earring, then another, And wait until the objects in the room take back Their shapes in the dawn, And wait until Each rumpled crease in the sheets & pillowcase Is as clear as a gift again, & wait — At a certain moment, that room, then all the rooms Of the empty Bayside, Will turn completely into light. • I place a cup on the sill & listen for the faint Tock of china on wood, & ... That moment of light is already this one — Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone: My hand hurrying across the page to get there On time, that place Of  undoing — • Where the shriek of  the carhop’s laugh, And the complete faith of the martyr, as he spins & shimmies in the light, And the inextricable candor of doubt by which Diebenkorn, One afternoon, made his presence known In the yellow pastels, then wiped his knuckles with a rag — Are one — are the salt, the nowhere & the cold — The entwined limbs of  lovers & the cold wave’s sprawl.

Applying to Heavy Equipment School I marched farther into the Great Plains And refused to come out. I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest. Around me in the fields, the hogs grunted And lay on their sides. You came with a little water and went away. The glass is still on the table, And the paper, And the burned scaffolds. * You were bent over the sink, washing your stockings. I came up behind you like the night sky behind the town. You stood frowning at your knuckles And did not speak. * At night I lie still, like Bolivia. My furnaces turn blue. My forests go dark. You are a low range of hills, a Paraguay. Now the clouds cover us both. It is raining and the movie houses are open.

So that the truant boy may go steady with the State, So that in his spine a memory of wings Will make his shoulders tense & bend Like a thing already flown When the bracelets of another school of love Are fastened to his wrists, Make a law that doesn’t have to wait Long until someone comes along to break it. So that in jail he will have the time to read How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode The king’s wrist died of a common cold, And learn that chivalry persists, And what first felt like an insult to the flesh Was the blank ‘o’ of love. Put the fun back into punishment. Make a law that loves the one who breaks it. So that no empty court will make a  judge recall Ice fishing on some overcast bay, Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought To be an interesting law, The kind of thing that no one can obey, A law that whispers “Break me.” Let the crows roost & caw. A good judge is an example to us all. So that the patrolman can still whistle “The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth And even show some faint gesture of respect While he cuffs the suspect, Not ungently, & says things like ok , That’s it

Frères humains qui après nous vivez, Soon they’ll have the speed freak twisting On a scaffold, soon the birds Will come to peck out his eyes, & when He’s too weak & exhausted to turn His head away, they’ll do it, too, They’ll peck his eyes right out. You’ll want to watch it happen, you’ll want To witness it. You’ll want to see Paolo And Francesca almost touch before They’re swept away again, him in one line Waiting for rations, her in another one, Both of  them naked, standing there, Cock & nipples shriveled in the cold. Frères humains qui après nous vivez, N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis.