The Darkening Trapeze

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
r />   Their shapes in the dawn,

  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