Larry Levis

“Dressed to die ... ” —Dylan Thomas Sister once of weeds & a dark water that held still In ditches reflecting the odd, Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept Their own counsel, we Were different, we kept our own counsel. Outside the tool shed in the noon heat, while our father Ground some piece of metal That would finally fit, with grease & an hour of pushing, The needs of the mysterious Ford tractor, We argued out, in adolescence, Whole systems of mathematics, ethics, And finally agreed that altruism, Whose long vowel sounded like the pigeons, Roosting stupidly & about to be shot In the barn, was impossible If one was born a Catholic. The Swedish Lutherans, whom the nuns called “Statue smashers,” the Japanese on Neighboring farms, were, we guessed, A little better off .... When I was twelve, I used to stare at weeds Along the road, at the way they kept trembling Long after a car had passed; Or at gnats in families hovering over Some rotting peaches, & wonder why it was I had been born a human. Why not a weed, or a gnat? Why not a horse, or a spider? And why an American? I did not think that anything could choose me To be a Larry Levis before there even was A Larry Levis. It was strange, but not strange enough To warrant some design. On the outside, The barn, with flaking paint, was still off-white. Inside, it was always dark, all the way up To the rafters where the pigeons moaned, I later thought, as if in sexual complaint, Or sexual abandon; I never found out which. When I walked in with a 12-gauge & started shooting, They fell, like gray fruit, at my feet— Fat, thumping things that grew quieter When their eyelids, a softer gray, closed, Part of the way, at least, And their friends or lovers flew out a kind of skylight Cut for loading hay. I don’t know, exactly, what happened then. Except my sister moved to Switzerland. My brother got a job With Colgate-Palmolive. He was selling soap in Lodi, California. Later, in his car, & dressed To die, or live again, forever, I drove to my own, first wedding. I smelled the stale boutonniere in my lapel, A deceased young flower. I wondered how my brother’s Buick Could go so fast, &, Still questioning, or catching, a last time, An old chill from childhood, I thought: why me, why her, & knew it wouldn’t last.

Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard Compose the dark, compose The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear One by one, above the schoolyard. If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened: A bird would still be riding the back of a horse, And the horse would go on grazing in a field, & the gleaners, At one with the land, the wind, the sun examining Their faces, would go on working, Each moment forgotten in the swipe of a scythe. But the walls of the labyrinth have already acquired Their rose tint from the blood of slaves Crushed into the stone used to build them, & the windows Of stained glass are held in place by the shriek And sighing body of a falling chimneysweep through The baked & blackened air. This ash was once a village, That snowflake, time itself. But until the day it is permitted to curl up in a doorway, And try to sleep, the snow falling just beyond it, There’s nothing for it to do: The soul rests its head in its hands & stares out From its desk at the trash-littered schoolyard, It stays where it was left. When the window fills with pain, the soul bears witness, But it doesn’t write. Nor does it write home Having no need to, having no home. In this way, & in no other Was the soul gradually replaced by the tens of thousands Of things meant to represent it— All of which proclaimed, or else lamented, its absence. Until, in the drone of auditoriums & lecture halls, it became No more than the scraping of a branch Against the side of a house, no more than the wincing Of a patient on a couch, or the pinched, nasal tenor Of the strung-out addict’s voice, While this sound of scratching, this tapping all night, Enlarging the quiet instead of making a music within it, Is just a way of joining one thing to another, Myself to whoever it is—sitting there in the schoolroom, Sitting there while also being led through the schoolyard Where prisoners are exercising in the cold light— A way of joining or trying to join one thing to another, So that the stillness of the clouds & the sky Opening beneath the blindfold of the prisoner, & the cop Who leads him toward it, toward the blank Sail of the sky at the end of the world, are bewildered So that everything, in this moment, bewilders Them: the odd gentleness each feels in the hand Of the other, & how they don’t stop walking, not now Not for anything.

I lay my head sideways on the desk, My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones, My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse, White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree. From where I sat, on still days, I’d watch The oak, the prisoner of that sky, or read The desk carved with adults’ names: Marietta Martin, Truman Finnell, Marjorie Elm; The wood hacked or lovingly hollowed, the flies Settling on the obsolete & built-in inkwells. I remember, tonight, only details, how Mrs. Avery, now gone, was standing then In her beige dress, its quiet, gazelle print Still dark with lines of perspiration from The day before; how Gracie Chin had just Shown me how to draw, with chalk, a Chinese Ideogram. Where did she go, white thigh With one still freckle, lost in silk? No one would say for sure, so that I’d know, So that all shapes, for days after, seemed Brushstrokes in Chinese: countries on maps That shifted, changed colors, or disappeared: Lithuania, Prussia, Bessarabia; The numbers four & seven; the question mark. That year, I ate almost nothing. I thought my parents weren’t my real parents, I thought there’d been some terrible mistake. At recess I would sit alone, seeing In the print of each leaf shadow, an ideogram— Still, indecipherable, beneath the green sound The bell still made, even after it had faded, When the dust-covered leaves of the oak tree Quivered, slightly, if I looked up in time. And my father, so distant in those days, Where did he go, that autumn, when he chose The chaste, faint ideogram of ash, & I had To leave him there, white bones in a puzzle By a plum tree, the sun rising over The Sierras? It is not Chinese, but English— When the past tense, when you first learn to use it As a child, throws all the verbs in the language Into the long, flat shade of houses you Ride past, & into town. Your father’s driving. On winter evenings, the lights would come on earlier. People would be shopping for Christmas. Each hand, With the one whorl of its fingerprints, with twenty Delicate bones inside it, reaching up To touch some bolt of cloth, or choose a gift, A little different from any other hand. You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark, But leaves names, lovers, places showing through: Gracie Chin, my father, Lithuania; A beige dress where dark gazelles hold still? Outside, it’s snowing, cold, & a New Year. The trees & streets are turning white. I always thought he would come back like this. I always thought he wouldn’t dare be seen.

for Gerald Stern At sixteen I was so vulnerable to every influence That the overcast light, making the trash of addicts & sunbathers suddenly clearer On the paths of the city park, seemed death itself spreading its shade Over the leaves, the swan boats, the gum wrappers, and the quarreling ducks. It took nothing more than a few clouds straying over the sun, And I would begin falling through myself like an anvil or a girl's comb or a feather Dropped, tossed, or spiraling by pure chance down the silent air shaft of a warehouse, The spiderweb in one fourth-floor window catching, in that moment, the sunset. For in such a moment, to fall was to be simplified & pure, With a neck snapped like a stem instead Of whoever I turned out to be, Wiping the window glass clear with one cuff To gaze out at a two-hundred-year-old live oak tethering The courtyard to its quiet, The tree so old it has outlived even its life as a cliché, And has survived, with no apparent effort, every boy who marched, like a wilderness Himself, past it on his way to enlist in Lee’s army, And now it swells gently in the mist & the early sunlight. So who saved me? And for what purpose? Beneath the small angel cut from cheap stone, there was nothing But my name & the years 1947-1949, And the tense, muggy little quiet of a place where singing ends, And where there is only the leftover colored chalk & the delusions of voodoo, The small bones & X’s on stones signifying the practitioner’s absence, Entirely voluntary, from the gnat swirl & humming of time; To which the chalked X on stone is the final theory; it is even illiterate. It is not even a lock of hair on a grave. It is not even The small crowd of roughnecks at Poe’s funeral, nor the blind drunkard Laughing there, the white of his eyes the unfurling of a cold surf below a cliff— Which is the blank wave sprawl of fact receding under the cries of gulls— Which is not enough. * I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now, Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled, Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A. I should go back again & try to talk my friend out of his diet Of methamphetamine & vodka yogurts & the look of resignation spreading over his face Like the gray shade of a tree spreading over a sleeper in the park— For it is all or nothing in this life, for there is no other. And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold, & Oswald will adjust The lenses on the scope of his rifle, the one Friend he has carried with him all the way out of his childhood, The silent wood of its stock as musical to him in its grain as any violin. This must have been what they meant, Lincoln & Whitman, joining hands one overcast spring afternoon To stroll together through the mud of Washington at the end Of the war, the tears welling up in both their eyes, Neither one of them saying a word, their hands clasped tightly together As they walk for block after block past The bay, sorrel, chestnut, and dapple-gray tail swish of horses, And waiting carriages, & neither one of them noticing, as they stroll & weave, The harness gall on the winters of a mare, Nor the gnats swarming over it, alighting now on the first trickle of blood uncaking from the sore; And the underfed rib cage showing through its coat each time it inhales Like the tines of a rake combing the battleground to overturn Something that might identify the dead at Antietam. The rake keeps flashing in the late autumn light. And Bakunin, with a face impassive as a barn owl’s & never straying from the one true text of flames? And Lincoln, absentmindedly trying to brush away the wart on his cheek As he dresses for the last time, As he fumbles for a pair of cuff links in a silk-lined box, As he anticipates some pure & frivolous pleasure, As he dreams for a moment, & is a woman for a moment, And in his floating joy has no idea what is going to happen to him in the next hour? And Oswald dozing over a pamphlet by Trotsky in the student union? Oh live oak, thoughtless beauty in a century of pulpy memoirs, Spreading into the early morning sunlight As if it could never be otherwise, as if it were all a pure proclamation of leaves & a final quiet— * But it’s all or nothing in this life; it’s smallpox, quicklime, & fire. It’s the extinct whistling of an infantry; it is all the faded rosettes of blood Turning into this amnesia of billboards & the ceaseless hunh? of traffic. It goes on & I go with it; it spreads into the sun & air & throws out a fast shade That will never sleep, and I go with it; it breaks Lincoln & Poe into small drops of oil spreading Into endless swirls on the water, & I recognize the pattern: * There there now, Nothing. Stop your sniveling. Stop sifting dirt through your fingers into your glass of milk, A milk still white as stone; whiter even. Why don’t you finish it? We’d better be getting on our way soon, sweet Nothing. I’ll buy you something pretty from the store. I’ll let you wear the flower in your hair even though you can only vanish entirely underneath its brown, implacable petals. Stop your sniveling. I can almost see the all night diner looming Up ahead, with its lights & its flashing sign a testimony to failure. I can almost see our little apartment under the freeway overpass, the cups on the mantle rattling continually— The Mojave one way; the Pacific the other. At least we’ll have each other’s company. And it’s not as if you held your one wing, tattered as it was, in contempt For being only one. It’s not as if you were frivolous. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Riding beside me, your seat belt around your invisible waist. Sweet Nothing. Sweet, sweet Nothing.