Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is.

Can you imagine the air filled with smoke? It was. The city was vanishing before noon or was it earlier than that? I can't say because the light came from nowhere and went nowhere. This was years ago, before you were born, before your parents met in a bus station downtown. She'd come on Friday after work all the way from Toledo, and he'd dressed in his only suit. Back then we called this a date, some times a blind date, though they'd written back and forth for weeks. What actually took place is now lost. It's become part of the mythology of a family, the stories told by children around the dinner table. No, they aren't dead, they're just treated that way, as objects turned one way and then another to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke. Go back to the beginning, you insist. Why is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work. Work was something that thrived on fire, that without fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life. We came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash, Williams, and I, it was late March, a new war was starting up in Asia or closer to home, one that meant to kill us, but for a moment the air held still in the gray poplars and elms undoing their branches. I understood the moon for the very first time, why it came and went, why it wasn't there that day to greet the four of us. Before the bus came a small black bird settled on the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up as though questioning the day. "A baby crow," someone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement, his lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly for a long time. "A grackle far from home," he said. One of the four of us mentioned tenderness, a word I wasn't used to, so it wasn't me. The bus must have arrived. I'm not there today. The windows were soiled. We swayed this way and that over the railroad tracks, across Woodward Avenue, heading west, just like the sun, hidden in smoke.

Again the day begins, only no one wants its sanity or its blinding clarity. Daylight is not what we came all this way for. A pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you're thrilled and terrified. You have to remember this isn't your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s been drinking and has no idea who this curious Andalusian is, unable even to speak the language of poetry. The young man who brought them together knows both Spanish and English, but he has a headache from jumping back and forth from one language to another. For a moment’s relief he goes to the window to look down on the East River, darkening below as the early night comes on. Something flashes across his sight, a double vision of such horror he has to slap both his hands across his mouth to keep from screaming. Let’s not be frivolous, let’s not pretend the two poets gave each other wisdom or love or even a good time, let’s not invent a dialogue of such eloquence that even the ants in your own house won’t forget it. The two greatest poetic geniuses alive meet, and what happens? A vision comes to an ordinary man staring at a filthy river. Have you ever had a vision? Have you ever shaken your head to pieces and jerked back at the image of your young son falling through open space, not from the stern of a ship bound from Vera Cruz to New York but from the roof of the building he works on? Have you risen from bed to pace until dawn to beg a merciless God to take these pictures away? Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human— the only animal that’s got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sights and will not let go. The young man was my cousin, Arthur Lierberman, then a language student at Columbia, who told me all this before he died quietly in his sleep in 1983 in a hotel in Perugia. A good man, Arthur, he survived graduate school, later came home to Detroit and sold pianos right through the Depression. He loaned my brother a used one to compose hideous songs on, which Arthur thought were genius. What an imagination Arthur had!

As a boy he played alone in the fields behind our block, six frame houses holding six immigrant families, the parents speaking only gibberish to their neighbors. Without the kids they couldn't say "Good morning" and be understood. Little wonder he learned early to speak to himself, to tell no one what truly mattered. How much can matter to a kid of seven? Everything. The whole world can be his. Just after dawn he sneaks out to hide in the wild, bleached grasses of August and pretends he's grown up, someone complete in himself without the need for anyone, a warrior from the ancient places our fathers fled years before, those magic places: Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea, Port Said, Alexandria, Lisbon, the Canaries, Caracas, Galveston. In the damp grass he recites the names over and over in a hushed voice while the sun climbs into the locust tree to waken the houses. The husbands leave for work, the women return to bed, the kids bend to porridge and milk. He advances slowly, eyes fixed, an animal or a god, while beneath him the earth holds its breath.

A rectangular Bulova, my Zadie called a dress watch, I wore it for years, and though it gave the wrong time I treasured the sense of community it offered, the beauty of certain numerals — the seven especially, the way it leaned into its subtle work and never changed, and signified exactly what it was and no more. In dreams I learned that only the watch and the circle of ash trees surrounding me, and the grass prodding my bare feet, and of course my nakedness were necessary, though common. Just surrendering my youth, I still believed everything in dreams meant something I could parse to discover who we were. As I write these words in sepia across a lined page I have no idea why they’ve taken the shape I’ve given them, some cursive, some not, some elegantly articulated, others plain, many of no use at all. They go on working as best they can, like the Parker 51 that spent its coming of age stumbling backwards into Yiddish or the Bulova that finally threw up its twin baroque arms in surrender to the infinite and quit without a word. The Parker still works and is never to blame. On good days it works better than I, and when it leaks it leaks only ink, never a word best left unsaid. As a boy I would steal into Zadie’s bedroom, find the watch in a velvet box, wind it, hold it to each ear — back then both worked — to hear its music, the jeweled wheels and axles that kept time alive. There is still such joy in these tokens from back of beyond: the watch, the Parker pen, the tiny pocket knife he used to separate truth from lies, the ivory cigarette holder — a gift, he claimed, from FDR who mistook him for a famous Russian violinist. I could call them “Infinite riches in a little room” or go cosmic and regard them as fragments of a great mystery instead of what they are, amulets against nothing.

Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street to see our famous firehouse, home of Engine 205 and Hook & Ladder 118 and home also to the mythic painting “Fire under the Bridge” decorating the corrugated sliding door. The painting depicts a giant American flag wrinkled by wind and dwarfing the famous Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches as best it can to get a purchase on Manhattan. In the distance a few dismal towers and beyond the towers still another river. A little deal table holds a tiny American flag—like the one Foreman held as he bowed to receive gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City—; this actual flag is rooted in a can of hothouse roses going brown at the edges and beginning to shed. There’s a metal collection box bearing the names of those lost during the recent burnings. Should you stop to shake the box— which is none of your business—you’ll hear only a whisper. Perhaps the donations are all hush money, ones, fives, tens, twenties, or more likely there are IOUs and the heart of Brooklyn has gone cold from so much asking. Down the block and across the street, a man sleeps on the sidewalk, an ordinary man, somehow utterly spent, he sleeps through all the usual sounds of a Brooklyn noon. Beside him a dog, a terrier, its muzzle resting on crossed paws, its brown eyes wide and intelligent. Between man and dog sits a take-out coffee cup meant to receive, next to it a picture of Jesus— actually a digital, color photograph of the Lord in his prime, robed and though bearded impossibly young and athletic, and— as always—alone. “Give what you can,” says a hand-lettered cardboard sign to all who pass. If you stand there long enough without giving or receiving the shabby, little terrier will close his eyes. If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name.

This is the house of the very rich. You can tell because it’s taken all The colors and left only the spaces Between colors where the absence Of rage and hunger survives. If you could Get close you could touch the embers Of red, the tiny beaks of yellow,

No, not in the flesh — if Jesus was ever in ordinary flesh — but in the faces of the Christian ladies, heads held high chanting their sorrows and joys for all to share. He had turned away, Froggy said, from sacred things since he was old enough to pay his way. And here he was half-gone on muscatel when he felt the soul soar loose from the wreck of his body, all 350 misshapen pounds of it. No, not in church, but on “the damn crosstown streetcar running late.” A distant Sunday night in the City of Dreams, Froggy on his way to his weekend of the usual low-notes, cheap cigars, Michigan wine, and stud poker, when Jesus “come a knockin’.” At Twelfth Street the trolley stopped and a dozen ladies mounted, each in her best flowered dress, each with her worn Bible in hand, each one blessed and glowing. “Changed my life,” Froggy says — for maybe the hundredth time — though how is hard to say. Orphan of destiny, descendant of voyagers, fur traders, whiskey priests run amok in the final wilderness, Froggy takes his ease on the battered throne of history — a sprung barrel chair — his tiny slippered feet resting on a mismatched ottoman out on the driveway. Sunday’s his day, he tells us. Sleeps late, breakfasts on OJ and sips of “Morgan Davis” — a consecrated beverage — , and delivers his great truths to anyone slow enough or dumb enough to listen.