by Larry Levis
Chin up? Ready?
TWELVE THIRTY ONE NINETEEN NINETY NINE
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 crěpe 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.
A SINGING IN THE ROCKS
Quirai, the site of the Inquisition in the New World,
Is a cathedral of dust specks whirling in light now.
All the hallucinations of the nave, transept, the chalice with the sound
Of the wind inside it, the saint’s relic like something obliterated
By the cries of another century—are there
To show how little they matter.
He rocks himself to sleep in this refusal to explain.
He naps in the empty spiderweb & is no more than its glistening
In the limbs of the apple tree—
How little they matter.
After driving all night I remember pulling over at dawn,
And climbing a low hill of twisted mesquite & a scattered
Outcropping of rocks gray in that light,
And hearing it there:
Dobro & steel guitar & the pinched, nasal twang of a country tenor,
A singing in the rocks though no one was there, & thinking
At first it was no more than the thin membrane & the cheap,
Inscrutable vision & brief psychosis that come in the wake
Of methamphetamine, a beige powder that smelled
Like wheat & was as silent, & was, for years, the only company
I ever had the pleasure of being completely alone with.
But the woman traveling with me heard it too, walking up the hill,
Waking to it there, so that she stopped & listened, but it was
As if she listened beyond it.
Even after we heard it there were the routine nights when she liked
To get quietly drunk on cheap vodka & think of her daughter—
Lymphoma a dead bloom in the woods, suspended leaves,
And how the nibbling of what was not yet pain when it began again
Was like disbelief flowing suddenly into the veins,
She was beginning to die, & to know it.
And so the singing, & the no one there, must have been
Different for her.
There was nothing we could do about it, & when the singing began
To grow fainter & cease, there was nothing we
Could do about that, either.
Not that a singing could have changed either one of us.
And the fact that we could not be changed seemed the brief meaning
Of what we listened to, there, until, after a while,
We could hear nothing but the unraveling sigh of traffic behind us
On the interstate. “Fuck you,” she said, & turned to walk down
A small path leading to the car, the parking lot, to a couple of
Weather-beaten public restrooms, the beige paint flaking off
The concrete & cement.
Beyond the valley I looked across there were mountains,
And beyond them, only another range of mountains,
And beyond them, another.
He is & is not the empty track of the fox,
And is & is not the edge of the wood that seems to be listening,
The paths disappearing again & again,
And the swirled snow making the darkness of the shop fronts
Visible, to show you how little they matter.
So say it & be done with the saying of it:
He waits & will wait forever in the delicate, small bones of the knight
Asleep in his luster, his armor, the glint of the swordblade at his side
Reflecting the raining sky & a life without the slightest hesitation.
He rejoices in pleasures too pure for this world.
He is the sore screech of the wheel in the addict’s voice,
And disbelief itself under the summer stars.
And the tenor voice of the sax & the snow swirling on the city streets
To frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable.
And in the perpetual snow of syllables meant to praise him,
Nothing changes but his sex & his preoccupations, so that he becomes,
In time, the woman
With a birthmark & a puzzled expression on her face as she listens
To the clattering loom of voices in the asylum, listens
For the scrape of the keel on the sand & the gulls’ cries.
If he is the saying, he is the obliteration of the saying,
And the sore screech of the wheel that outlives the addict.
They will say he is the saying & the finishing of the saying,
And that even the unsaying restores the beginning.
It isn’t so, & the hawk caught in the boy’s net
That I watched, later that day, had no sophistry about it, no guile.
Its choice was the tearing of itself to shreds.
So that, in an hour or so, it bled to death. And, therefore, no.
And therefore
He is the moment the trap springs give & something is snagged
For a last time in the cross-stitched mesh of the net.
So say that on a hill of twisted mesquite & a scattered outcropping
Of rocks gray in that first light,
He was the singing & the no one there,
Dobro & slide guitar & the pinched, nasal twang of a country tenor.
And a dust of snow, already, glimpsed suddenly in a furrow,
On a windowsill, on the frayed cuff of someone on a park bench
Staring intently at nothing, at passing traffic.
And therefore I say without the fear
That has been my faithful accomplice, & conniver corkscrewing
Through all my days until they resembleth the cracked glaze of frost
Already dissolved
By light, by the nothing all light is,
That in the moment after Dobro & slide guitar & the pinched note
Of defeat in her voice had ceased,
Something continued, unaccompanied, as I turned away from it,
And therefore,
He is the singing in the rocks & the no one there.
He is the pain & the frostbite in the melody.
There should be some third
& final thing to say of him here, although
It should be said by someone else, leaning at four a.m.
On the scuffed black leatherette of a too-tall, out-of-fashion speaker,
Only the amp glowing on the dark stage of a country-rock bar
In Missouri, smoking & staring out at the empty dance floor,
And there isn’t. And therefore:
What comes after, in the walking home alone forever, & the writing it
Out, is like the testimony of a witness, always imperfect, changing,
Until one is spent in the exhaustion of the music, in each twisted,
Unmemorized limb of mesquite scoring the blood-spattered
Hawk’s screech of each note—no voice left in it & no accompaniment—
What comes after is the knowledge that
One is no longer part of it, & can no longer be part of it,
Who, with no one to answer to, passes the brown, indifferent grasses
In the winter months, the lascivious blooms that come on later, cock
Purple & blush pink, noticing them one moment, then looking away
Without focusing on anything in particular, unable to believe either
The chill of visitation or any lie the wind tells him—
Forgetting, & becoming,
Without the slightest awareness of it in that moment, another.
GHAZAL
Does exile begin at birth? I lived beside a wide river
For so long I stopped hearing it.
As when a glass shatters during an argument,
And we are secretly thrilled…. We wanted it to break.
Always something missing now in the cry of one bird,
Its wings flared against the wood.
Still, everything that is singular has a name:
Stone, song, trembling, waist, & snow. I remember how
My old psychiatrist would pinch his nose between
A thumb & forefinger, look up at me & sigh.
II
THE SPINE REMEMBERS WINGS
GHOST CONFEDERACY
They were the uncountable stars, the first time
We saw them, they were the glitter and the distance.
We were the swimming shapes of trees, that cast
Of shade extending over their tents. We hid
In ravines, but not to be one with nature.
We knew what being one with nature really meant.
And we were never the color-blind grasses,
We were never the pattern of the snake
Fading into the pattern of the leaves;
We were the empty clarity one glimpses
In water falling, in water spreading into
A thin white veil on what is never there,
The moment clear and empty as a heaven
Someone has just swept clean of any meaning.
If minié ball or cannon fire had a meaning,
We would have had maybe thirty seconds left
Of heaven to pin the right leaves back on trees
In summer and reattach the amputated limbs
Of boys. But the moment, clouding over,
Becomes again only an endless slipping of water
Over the spillways, and falls roaring in the ears
Until they ring, and the throat swollen
With failure and desire mingling there.
I could taste it in my mouth for days. It tasted
Like the wafer a friend said the Holy Ghost
Came wrapped up in. The Holy Ghost tastes like dust.
It liberates the body from the body so riddled
With rifle holes you can look right through us.
Look through us to what? To slums and shopping malls?
To one suburb joining another? Who grieves
On minimum wages? Look through us to that place—
Within sight of the trailer park and the truck stop—
Where Gettysburg could not be reenacted,
Where what was left of us on either side
Lay down our rifles, wept, embraced each other once.
That dust you taste in the Holy Ghost is us,
Dust ground into the windows you gaze out of,
And whether those windows burn or whether lights
Come on again in rows of quiet houses is a matter
Of how you treat him, sitting over there and still
Bleeding from a bad haircut, that captured soldier, that
Enemy, that risen dust, that boy, that stranger, you.
MAKE A LAW SO THAT THE SPINE REMEMBERS WINGS
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, relax,
It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist,
Lean back just a little, against me.
IN THEORY
Before all the trees became bibles,
The forests & fields were pure,
The river sometimes forgot
That it was only a river,
And the tiger sometimes felt
It stood for more than itself,
More than the zoo all around it,
And the stone wished to be more
Than another stone among stones
In a building no longer there,
In a building made of stones.
In the bomb-magnified quiet,
Their flesh spilled out of their gowns,
It hung straight down from the windows
As we passed in the streets below,
And maybe one or two of them seemed
To be calling out to someone,
Calling, but without sound.
Later they said that, in theory,
The name of the town didn’t matter.
It was all places, & none.
They said only theory was pure.
“And even then, only in theory,”
Is what I almost answered,
But it sounded better unsaid.
For though it was years later,
The breastbone & breasts of a girl
Who’d been dead less than an hour,
Still whitened over my head,
Was it her sun-dappled breasts that now
Seemed to turn all flesh into theory?
For only she could have known,
With all the other dead, whether
The place where it happened mattered.
They said we’d liberated them.
The trees & the streets were quiet,
And the stone was still a stone,
In a building made of stones,
; In a building no longer there.
And the tiger was still a tiger,
A tiger that no one saw,
And the river ran silently on.
THE SPACE
The truth is, the whispered shape of his death
Is too loud to hear.
It’s in the sound of traffic overhead,
Like a saw mill’s whir
The moment after the lumber passes through it,
Changes into time, into
Charred houses where the linen was stripped
From beds & lace from
Dresses to bandage time together & hold it still
For one more moment.
It began as no more than a joke with one wing
That flew in circles
Through the smoke & talk of infinity assembled
In Bell’s Tavern.
Look around. There’s nothing left of it.
The wind leans
Against the girders, flange after gray-green flange
That frames what’s left,
A hush of space beneath a freeway overpass,
Singed air & asphalt where
You can trace a pattern in the shattered glass
Of a green bottle
Or read a destiny in spit before it dries,
Or bear witness
To a drunk guy lurching to a stop
As if to confer
With a god who swirls around him in a windblown
Gust of trash,
Slow waltz of grit when the body isn’t there,
Flesh becoming pine
And a water that tastes like leather. Who
Would ever have thought
The body could be poured? Like anything else?
Who would have supposed
The body pouring out of the body in the stench
Of resurrection?
One whiff of it & you wouldn’t be able ever again
To live with yourself.
You’d live with it as though it were someone else.
A woman I once knew
Asked a gravedigger about exhuming remains, moving
The dead from one place
To another. The gravedigger was neither old nor
Young. He’d just been out
Of work too long. It was the only job he could get,