Philip Levine

Tw o young men—you just might call them bo ys— waiting for the Woodward streetcar to get

When my brother came home from war he carried his left arm in a black sling but assured us most of it was still there. Spring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out. I stood in a long line waiting for bread. The woman behind me said it was shameless, someone as strong as I still home, still intact while her Michael was burning to death. Yes, she could feel the fire, could smell his pain all the way from Tarawa– or was it Midway?–and he so young, younger than I, who was only fourteen, taller, more handsome in his white uniform turning slowly gray the way unprimed wood grays slowly in the grate when the flames sputter and die. “I think I’m going mad,” she said when I turned to face her. She placed both hands on my shoulders, kissed each eyelid, hugged me to her breasts and whispered wetly in my bad ear words I’d never heard before. When I got home my brother ate the bread carefully one slice at a time until nothing was left but a blank plate. “Did you see her,” he asked, “the woman in hell, Michael’s wife?” That afternoon I walked the crowded streets looking for something I couldn’t name, something familiar, a face or a voice or less, but not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.

Newspaper says the boy killed by someone, don’t say who. I know the mother, waking, gets up as usual, washes her face in cold water, and starts the coffee pot. She stands by the window up there on floor sixteen wondering why the street’s so calm with no cars going or coming, and then she looks at the wall clock and sees the time. Now she’s too awake to go back to bed, she’s too awake not to remember him, her one son, or to forget exactly how long yesterday was, each moment dragged into the next by the force of her will until she thought this simply cannot be. She sits at the scarred, white kitchen table, the two black windows staring back at her, wondering how she’ll go back to work today. The windows don’t see anything: they’re black, eyeless, they give back only what’s given; sometimes, like now, even less than what’s given, yet she stares into their two black faces moving her head from side to side, like this, just like I’m doing now. Try it awhile, go ahead, it’s not going to kill you. Now say something, it doesn’t matter what you say because all the words are useless: “I’m sorry for your loss.” “This too will pass.” “He was who he was.” She won’t hear you out because she can only hear the torn words she uses to pray to die. This afternoon you and I will see her just before four alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a navel orange secured under her arm, and we’ll look away. Under your breath make her one promise and keep it forever: in the little store-front church down the block, the one with the front windows newspapered, you won’t come on Saturday or Sunday to kneel down and pray for life eternal.

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross.

Everyone comes back here to die as I will soon. The place feels right since it’s half dead to begin with. Even on a rare morning of rain, like this morning, with the low sky hoarding its riches except for a few mock tears, the hard ground accepts nothing. Six years ago I buried my mother’s ashes beside a young lilac that’s now taller than I, and stuck the stub of a rosebush into her dirt, where like everything else not human it thrives. The small blossoms never unfurl; whatever they know they keep to themselves until a morning rain or a night wind pares the petals down to nothing. Even the neighbor cat who shits daily on the paths and then hides deep in the jungle of the weeds refuses to purr. Whatever’s here is just here, and nowhere else, so it’s right to end up beside the woman who bore me, to shovel into the dirt whatever’s left and leave only a name for some- one who wants it. Think of it, my name, no longer a portion of me, no longer inflated or bruised, no longer stewing in a rich compost of memory or the simpler one of bone shards, dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes, the roots of the eucalyptus I planted in ’73, a tiny me taking nothing, giving nothing, and free at last.

The little girl won’t eat her sandwich; she lifts the bun and looks in, but the grey beef coated with relish is always there. Her mother says, “Do it for mother.” Milk and relish and a hard bun that comes off like a hat—a kid’s life is a cinch. And a mother’s life? “What can you do with a man like that?” she asks the sleeping cook and then the old Negro who won’t sit. “He’s been out all night trying to get it. I hope he gets it. What did he ever do but get it?” The Negro doesn’t look, though he looks like he’s been out all night trying. Everyone’s been out all night trying. Why else would we be drinking beer at attention? If she were younger, or if I were Prince Valiant, I would say that fate brought me here to quiet the crying, to sweeten the sandwich of the child, to waken the cook, to stop the Negro from bearing witness to the world. The dawn still hasn’t come, and now we hear the 8 o’clock whistles blasting from heaven, and with no morning the day is sold.

We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from.

He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed Because he’s white; in London because he’s black; In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab: Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back. He holds up seven thick little fingers To show me he’s rated seventh in the world, And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood. He asks me to tell all I can remember Of my father, his uncle; he talks of the war In North Africa and what came after, The loss of his father, the loss of his brother, The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood. “Here they live, here they live and not die,” And he points down at his black head ridged With black kinks of hair. He touches my hair, Tells me I should never disparage The stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter. Sadly his fingers wander over my face, And he says how fair I am, how smooth. We stand to end this first and last visit. Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two, No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders, Kisses my lips, his eyes still open, My imaginary brother, my cousin, Myself made otherwise by all his pain.