by Larry Levis
When I say you to what isn’t there I mean me.
It is as if our language did this to us,
As if, at some point, we became others in it,
Others in a crowd of others who were just like us,
Who strolled through the Accademia in Venice,
Where sometimes it was raining & sometimes it wasn’t.
We stared at the blind woman with the sign
Around her neck, & knew we had failed in everything.
Donatello is dead leaves & you can’t
Feel sorry for him without pretending to.
You might be able to feel sorry for pretending
To feel sorry, especially if you are a child, but …
That was the lesson in the painting,
Which was by Donatello once & then by Giorgione.
There’s not much point in confessing to things
These days. Still, I love the sound of gunfire
In my neighborhood, always slightly distant,
At least three blocks away on most nights.
Something in me loves the slightly distant
Sound of gunfire, & something else does not,
Because it thinks it shouldn’t. It must be that
Failure enlarges you & divides you, like a cell.
The two of them are resting their hands on the table
After writing this. Writing this because
we can’t afford to travel anywhere.
The summer’s spiderwebs glisten in the eaves
Beyond the window. It’s not as if we’re poor,
Or anything. It’s not like we’re sitting here complaining
About it, about sitting here, I mean.
It’s what we’ve been longing to do all along. In a way,
You could say we’re celebrating something,
Even if it doesn’t have a name.
It seems so limitless, the litter in the streets,
The large families of the poor, the stars over it all.
IF HE CAME & DIMINISHED ME & MAPPED MY WAY
Who was there in the uncountable stars, in the distance,
And in the cold glittering?
Who leaned with the wind against the trees all day,
And who slept in the swing’s empty stillness under them?
Who was present in the pattern of the snake fading
Into the pattern of the leaves again?
And who presided over the empty clarity of water falling,
Water spreading into a thin, white veil
Glimpsed just once in a moment clear & empty as a heaven—
Once heaven has been swept clean of any meaning?
Whose childhood is no more than a blackened rafter,
Something left after fire has swept through it?
It is years later when I come back to that place where I’d hiked once,
And somehow lost the trail, & then,
For a while, walked in the Company of Hallucination & Terror,
And noted afterward, like something closing within me,
That slight disappointment when I found
The trail again, when the rocks & trees took
Their places beside it, & I went on, up
To the summit of bare rock & the smoke rising
Lazily out of the small hut there, soup & coffee,
A table of brochures & maps of hiking trails
I browsed through idly, recalling being lost,
Recalling the way each rock looked, how
Expressionless it was, how each
Was the same as another, without a face, until
I understood I was completely lost, & then
How someone so thin I could have passed my hand through him
Walked beside me there, & though I did not dare look
To see who it was, I glanced sideways once to see
How his ribs depicted famine, & how his steps beside me
Were effortless, were like air gliding through air
Again & again without haste or hesitation
As the trail appeared again under my feet & rose
Upward in a long series of switchbacks
Through a forest I no longer believed in.
What I felt was diminishment, embarrassment, &
He must be starving by now, his face multiplying
To become the haunted faces of others in the streets,
Where to walk at night is to be flayed alive beneath
The freezing rain, where the trees glisten with ice,
And the lights are left on all night in the big stores,
If the pleasure of his company does not last,
If the terror of his company does not last,
If forgetting or remembering him are the same, now,
As I slow the car, pull over to the curb,
And wait until I see my dealer emerge
Cautiously as always from the fenced walkway beside
An abandoned house in a street of abandoned,
Or nearly vacant & for sale, houses,
And if, by getting high, one can live
Effortlessly anywhere for a little while, if
Me & my dealer, a Jamaican named John Donne,
Gaze out at the rain & listen to the hushed clatter
Of an empty metal shopping cart someone pushes through the rain,
If we gaze out at the living, & at the dead, & they are the same,
If the sound of a bus going past & the sound of the wind
Are the same, are what is left to listen to in the world,
Though the world sleeps, & the trees above us sleep, their limbs
Mending themselves in the cold wind,
Then both of Us would avert our Faces from His Face.
FRANÇOIS VILLON ON THE CONDITION OF PITY IN OUR TIME
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.
In wind & rain, the lovers almost touch,
and gulls & ravens settle on his shoulders.
You watch because you love to watch.
In plague times, the streets fill with voyeurs.
I know. The sockets of my eyes are dry
As little thimbles made of blistered skin,
And that inward savor of the infinite
Is salt again, one wave hidden in another.
We’re broken buttons, we’re blown dust.
There’s not one tear left in all of us.
I know, for I am François Villon, murderer,
Thief: pustules, blisters, triumphing sores,
Your disappearing likeness on the cross!
ANONYMOUS SOURCE
Hoping to escape, I frequented the docks & went unseen,
Ignoring the cold & a colder sea in which there was, at least, no change of regime.
And later, in a tour bus requisitioned by the police,
I gazed out at the examples of closed casinos lining the beach,
Seaweed wreathing the busy, baroque stillness of their verandas.
As if we needed such reminders.
The voices over the loudspeakers, galvanized & trite,
Were loud enough to keep everything quiet.
And just as one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is a constant & inappropriate inclination to
ward spontaneous & delayed rhyming,
I was, I think, betrayed by bad timing.
Refinement? Good taste?
I’ve found, at least in revolutions, that they simply have no place.
In fact, a few weeks after the coup even the pettiest
Of newly appointed public officials was able to furnish his office
With a choice of elaborate heirlooms
Confiscated from some country estate: cloisonné vases became spittoons;
Pets ate from dishes of silver & cut glass;
And peasants slept on ottomans & love seats displaying some outlandish
Pattern of swans violently intertwined with last century’s roses.
Below, in the plaza, I watched as those charged with treason were sprayed with firehoses,
Then made to stand at attention all day in handcuffs & a lukewarm rain.
Behind them, the wild blossoming of cherries looked insane.
I watched them because … there wasn’t much else to do,
Having been made to wait for an interview.
I can’t say I felt much nostalgia for the king & queen,
So enchanted by their own story
They ended stripped & hung on hooks like sides of beef, smoked & curing.
Mostly I missed the gambling.
Beyond that, the new methods of torture, intended, I suppose, to be ironic, remained
Altogether too tacitly the same—
The princess who was made to appear at a mock recital,
But missing her tongue now, & who afterward was forced to attend the reception wearing a tiny, hand-made bridle
And blinders over her face?
Thugs from the countryside, in uniforms now, & sniffing brandy & tulips, took turns holding the reins;
The answer to their prolonged parlor game
Was, of course,
An obvious pun, in English, on their word for horse.
So cruelty returned to its usual throne. And, in a few weeks,
The rebels who had come to power were sipping iced drinks
With the former administrators on the daffodil-laden, roof-top terrace
Of an empty hotel that was, once, the downtown winter palace.
But then, how could they do otherwise, once everyone was free?
Certainly they took no pleasure in the routine inspection of factories
And schools, nor in the feigned
Attention they paid to their president,
Still dressed in camouflaged fatigues, & yet so absent-
Minded, so paranoid, he forgot me entirely. Thank God (or something) for paranoia;
I was given a sinecure,
A tedious but mild post with the Department of Agriculture,
And a wheezing Renault with threadbare tires.
And as more & more farms went bankrupt with new policies, I looked away.
In the provinces, I sat in the stippled sunlight of the cafés,
And read the foreign papers,
Or, loitering, strolling through thatched villages, I began to admire
The precise & gradually fading patina on posters
That had once depicted, though too clearly for me, some pastoral scene
In which cattle moved lissomely as wheat,
And liberators waved from hillsides; it was all sweet, yes, & stupid,
Like life itself, or the end of Candide.
And in the city I gambled illegally in my forgotten neighborhood
Shaded by mulberries as still & untroubled as druids—
The same punks & pensioners below, the same pigeons above,
The street lined with billboards relentlessly displaying couples in love—
At first, of course, with their carbines, then later with an Idea, &, presumably, each other.
And the cafés filling with traffickers
In the Black Market items: Levi’s, hashish, Black Sabbath T-shirts?
There are days when I love it here.
And although this country remains closed to visitors,
I, for one, am thankful. To the West, the gates at the border wear a covering
Of alternately bleached & frostbitten, unmolested & therefore unwithering
Vines that grow in an untalkative leisure, a sleeping platoon …
(It can look really unnerving under a full moon)
Of the rankest vegetation.
Obviously the guards in their tower above it have never felt the slightest inclination
To even try to hack through it.
And so it came to me as something of a surprise
That on the borders of the remotest provinces, & almost always in private,
Everyone has begun to whisper of the ruin
That must come to this country as inevitably as the first tourist,
And, in the rural currency of their dreams, they worship
Something overwhelming, a god in another style, one so aloof & uninformed,
So camouflaged as the tuneless
Snow, or shade, He resists even a prolonged examination,
And makes any escape from the eventual thrill of His contamination
Seem frankly impossible,
And, for the time being, not at all desirable.
Now that’s style.
And these peasants won’t negotiate their long sleep until
It has restored that sheep-tenanted, stone eyesore on the hill,
That castle whose attic is starlight & a heaven, vast, unfinished—
Each twilight like a blueprint in which something is always missing.
In fact, hiking toward that castle at dawn, each time, as I drew nearer, I’ve watched it gradually vanish!
There’s nothing up there but goat trails leading nowhere, stunted pines, & mist.
If it is there, then I don’t exist …
No. That’s not it, either. I finally write all of this
In the suburban boudoir of the magistrate’s lovely, rebellious, gum-chewing daughter
Asleep beside me. And as my pen hesitates one last time above this paper,
My hand, recollecting the strap
Tied over it, the rain falling outside the windows of the asylum
That held it captive
In the moment before the slightly rusted electrodes were fastened,
Even now it rejoices only in what it is.
And I find myself gazing at a wall recently remodeled
In a flocked chintz paper, its motionless but swelling pattern of enormous lilacs, as precise & repetitive as Hell’s,
Recalls the first light entering the first garden,
A pattern as carnivorous as change—
As now, the antique sound of the spinning loom in the lane,
Slowing to a final stop, gives out a brief, sore squeal—
And writing it down, scoring the sound like a music until he is blent to the only miracle,
Even the one listener seems, brief as he is, unnecessarily real.
OCEAN PARK #17, 1968: HOMAGE TO DIEBENKORN
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
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.
THRESHOLD OF THE OBLIVIOUS BLOSSOMING
When I said one blossom desires the air,
Another the shadows, I was free
Of desires. Beyond the doorsill the café tables
Were empty because it was raining.
The rain was empty as well, & there was no poignancy
Left in it when I looked up at it falling, & went on
Sitting inside & waiting for my dealer to show up so I could buy
Two grams of crystal methedrine from her, talk for a moment,
And finish my coffee.
When I thought of the petals of the magnolia blossom
Flattened by passing traffic to the pavement & the gradual
Discoloration of them, their white like that of communion dresses
Becoming gray & a darker gray moment by moment,
When I knew I wanted them to mean nothing
And suggest everything, desire rushed back into things,
But not into the blossoms & not into the air.
V
CODA
GOD IS ALWAYS SEVENTEEN
This is the last poem in the book. In a way, I don’t even want
to finish it. I’d rather go to bed & jack off under the covers
But I’d probably lose interest in it & begin wondering about God,
And whether He’s tried the methamphetamine I sent Him yet, & if He still