The Darkening Trapeze

by Larry Levis

Listens to the Clash & whether the new job He got for Mozart

  As a janitorial assistant in Tulsa is working out.

  Besides, I can’t imagine a body in the first faint stirrings of arousal

  Without feeling sorry for it now, & anyway, I’ve built a fire in the fireplace

  And I don’t have a fire screen yet, & have to watch it until it goes out,

  Even the last lukewarm ember. It isn’t my house.

  It belongs to a bank in St. Louis somewhere & they have four thousand

  Different ways to punish me if the place goes up in flames, including the guys

  From Medellín who work for them now & specialize in pain.

  Besides, it’s still winter everywhere & maybe you want to hear a story

  With a fire burning quietly beside it. The story on this night when it

  Got really cold, & the darkness of the night spreading

  Over the sky seemed larger than it should have been, though

  Nobody mentioned it. It was something

  You didn’t feel like bringing up if you were sitting in a bar

  Among your friends. But all that happened was the night kept getting larger

  Then larger still, & then there was a squeal of brakes

  Outside the bar, & then what they call in prose the “sickening” crunch

  Of metal as two cars collided & in a little while the guy went back to telling

  This story in which the warm snow was falling on the yard

  Where he & the other prisoners were exercising. I guess the guy

  Had evidently done some time, though everyone listening was too polite

  To bring it up. And what happened in it was a clerk bleeding to death

  In a 7-Eleven, & the guy telling it called 911 for an ambulance, & the police found both

  Cash from the till & the gun on him when they arrived. He didn’t think he’d shot

  Anyone that night or anyone ever & was surprised & puzzled

  When they made a match on the gun, the clerk lived to testify, & they convicted

  Him. No one along the bar said anything when he’d finished

  Telling it, & the night went on enlarging in the story, & I think our silence

  Cut him loose & let him go falling. And one by one, we paid & got up & left

  And went out under the stars. I have a child who isn’t doing well in school.

  It’s not his grades. It’s that he can’t wake up.

  He misses his morning classes & doesn’t answer when I call & doesn’t

  Return my calls. The last time I saw him we took the train down from Connecticut

  To New York & wandered around Times Square. We went into this record store

  And pretended to browse through some albums there

  Because we didn’t know what to say to each other. It was night. It was just

  Before the Christmas season, & the clerks in the store

  Would call out loudly Can I Help Anybody & Can I Help Someone & there was

  Some music playing & something inconsolable

  And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget

  Being there with him & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

  NOTES

  The dates, where listed, represent those corresponding to the last saved drafts on Larry Levis’s computer. In some cases, subsequent handwritten revisions on a hard-copy draft of a poem were also incorporated into a piece in an attempt to establish as near a “final” draft as possible.

  “Gossip in the Village”: This poem was originally titled “Fifth Season.” It was written in Iowa City, in the spring of 1982, and its title was later changed to “Gossip in the Village.” I first saw the poem as part of a manuscript titled Adolescence, an early draft of the collection that was to become Levis’s fourth book, Winter Stars. At various times, the manuscript was also titled Trouble; in 1984, Levis told Bruce Boston he was thinking of calling his new book Sensationalism. After Boston discouraged him, Levis consulted with Philip Levine and published the book, in 1985, as Winter Stars.

  “New Year’s Eve at the Santa Fe Hotel, Fresno, California”: This poem was written as a gift for Levis’s close friends Bruce and Marsha Boston.

  “La Strada”: The movie by Fellini, from 1954, starring Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina. The final line of the poem appears also with a slight variation within the body of the poem, “Boy in Video Arcade,” from Levis’s posthumous collection, Elegy.

  “Carte de l’Assassin à M. André Breton”: The title refers to one of the Surrealist games popular with Breton and other poets and artists.

  “The Worm in the Ear”: Accepted for publication before Levis’s death, this poem appeared posthumously in the American Poetry Review.

  “Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine”: This poem is dated 11-9-92.

  “Ghazal”: This poem also appears in the manuscript of poems titled Adolescence.

  “Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings”: Dated 2-13-96.

  “In Theory”: Dated 2-25-95.

  “Idle Companion”: The poem is dedicated to Eric Walker and Abby Wolf, poets who attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and were close friends of Levis and Marcia Southwick during the years they taught there.

  “The Necessary Angel”: This homage to Stevens is the most complete version existing in Levis’s papers. See also his poem “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate,” section 3, titled “Stevens” (in Elegy).

  “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire”: See the Afterword.

  “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It”: The term tsuica refers to a Romanian plum brandy. The poem is dated 11-10-95.

  “Col Tempo”: Dated 8-3-95.

  “If He Came & Dimished Me & Mapped My Way”: Dated 5-22-95. See John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (13) and John Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” The poem uses in its opening section mild variants of lines also found in the opening sections of “Ghost Confederacy,” which is undated.

  “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time”: Dated 12-9-95. For my extended note on this poem, see “On ‘François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time’ by Larry Levis” from the November 2014 issue of Poetry.

  “Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn”: Dated 9-8-95. An early draft of this poem originally opened with thirty lines that Levis later used as a discrete section of his poem “Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope” (in Elegy).

  “Threshold of the Oblivious Blossoming”: Dated 6-8-95

  “God Is Always Seventeen”: See the Afterword.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The American Poetry Review: “The Worm in the Ear”

  Blackbird: “The Space”; “Ghost Confederacy”; “La Strada”; “A Singing in the Rocks”; “The Necessary Angel”; “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It”; “God Is Always Seventeen”

  Field: “Threshold of the Oblivious Blossoming”

  Great River Review: “Ghazal”

  Miramar: “New Year’s Eve at the Santa Fe Hotel, Fresno, California”

  The New Yorker: “Gossip in the Village”

  Poetry: “Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine”; “Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn”; “Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings”; “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time”

  Quarterly West: “Idle Companion”

  Richmond Magazine: “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire”

  The Southern Review: “In Theory”; “Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil”; “Col Tempo”; “If He Came & Diminished Me & Mapped My Way”; “Anonymous Source”

  Spillway: “Carte de l’Assassin à M. André Breton”

  The Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner, 2014), edited by David Lehman and Terrance Hayes: “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It”

  Thanks to Bruce Boston, Christopher Buckley, Carol Muske-Dukes, Alex Long, and M.L. Williams for their help in locating poems.

  Special
thanks to Gregory Donovan, Mary Flinn, Anna Journey, Gregory Kimbrell, Emilia Phillips, Joshua Poteat, Amy Tudor, John Ulmschneider, and the Special Collections and Archives division of James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University.

  Thanks also to Sheila Brady, Nicholas Levis, Philip Levine, and Jeffrey Shotts.

  AFTERWORD

  After Larry Levis’s death in May 1996, his sister, Sheila Brady, asked his oldest friend, former teacher, and lifelong mentor, Philip Levine, if he would be willing to edit a posthumous collection of Larry’s poems. Levine agreed, and he asked me if I would help him look through what he’d been told was a significant amount of unpublished work. This posthumous collection became the book published as Elegy.

  I had known Larry Levis since I was eighteen years old, when he first introduced me to Philip Levine, and he had become my closest friend in and out of poetry. Except for Levine, who knew Larry’s work more intimately than anyone, I felt that I had an unusual perspective on these unpublished poems, as Larry was in the habit of sending copies of his poems to me, Phil, and other friends for comment long before they would appear in journals or in books. He would also send his friends a typescript copy of each new book as he was assembling it. I had agreed to help Phil in whatever way he needed, and not long after, we both received identical boxes filled with copies and drafts of Larry’s poems. For the most part, this work had been pulled from Larry’s computers in his office at Virginia Commonwealth University or found among his papers in his home office. Mary Flinn and Greg Donovan—founders of the superb online journal Blackbird and Larry’s close friends and colleagues—as well his former student and friend Amy Tudor all worked to find every unpublished poem available. What we found, as Levine mentions in his introduction to Elegy, were multiple drafts of many of the poems, some of which were clearly unfinished; yet others seemed remarkably finished. Larry’s friends at VCU had been, in my view, heroic in assembling the most complete and final versions they were able to find or construct from his many drafts; at times, they had even tried to include the revisions they’d found scrawled on scattered Post-its and other notes left on his desk.

  I recognized a few of the poems in the box as having come from the period when Larry lived in Utah (1980–1994), and they’d clearly been pulled off the computer he’d brought with him from Salt Lake City to Richmond. A few other poems were originally part of a manuscript he’d sent me called Adolescence, but were later dropped as that manuscript became the book Winter Stars, published in 1985. Yet, to me, the most astonishing thing about looking at these poems gathered in their huge cardboard box was that the great majority—nearly two hundred pages—had been written since The Widening Spell of the Leaves, published in 1991. This was almost entirely new work.

  The process of working on Elegy was difficult for Phil and for me too; it felt emotionally charged and—to me, at least—psychologically daunting. I believe that Levis was the poet Levine admired most of all other contemporary poets, yet he was also as much a son to Phil as he was a protégé, as much an irreplaceable friend as an admired poet. For the first few months, every time Phil and I tried phoning one another to talk about the poems we’d been reading—well, we simply couldn’t do it; we couldn’t talk about this impossible task. In order to talk about some selection of Larry’s poems, we first had to admit that Larry was dead. It took almost five months before we could actually have our first conversation about the work itself. Finally, over that next nine months, Elegy began to take shape.

  Levine had a clear idea of how he wanted to present Levis’s work, and that was to include a group of the shorter, more lyrical pieces we had found and to set them alongside the sequence of longer “elegy” poems, which were somewhat similar in style to Levis’s late work in The Widening Spell of the Leaves. Yet, as we looked through the poems, it was clear that there were also many longer poems that were distinct from the “elegy” poems and that stood apart from that sequence. Because it was impossible for reasons of space to include those poems also, we set them aside and, with two exceptions, included only those nine poems that were clearly meant to be part of the “elegy” sequence. Almost all of those longer, operatic, and at times wildly ambitious poems necessarily held back from Elegy are collected here for the first time in The Darkening Trapeze.

  Included also in this collection is a poem with a fascinating history, “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire,” which I have always believed was meant to be the tenth of Levis’s “elegy” poems. Some of the “elegy” poems had been titled, in their early incarnations, “Poem with …” instead of “Elegy with …” I believe that “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire” was meant to complete the cycle of ten elegies Levis had been working toward in order to create his own Duino Elegies, his own The Book of Nightmares. Sadly, the final page of “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire” had been dramatically X-ed out by Levis, with an indecipherable revision scrawled down the margin alongside the X-ed-out typescript. None of us—all of whom had read Levis’s cursive for twenty years or more—could read the revised version. Levine, with regret, decided we couldn’t publish the poem, as we had no way of knowing what Levis had intended for the final draft. Remarkably, only a month or two after the publication of the book Elegy, a videotape of Levis reading “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire” just two weeks before his death was made available to Mary Flinn. This reading is posted for viewing at Blackbird, which also holds a wealth of essays and commentaries about Levis’s poetry. The version of the poem that Levis read on the video was the final, revised version we had been looking for. If this final draft had been available at the time, I might have argued to publish two separate books of Levis’s poems—one volume of the ten elegies, and a second volume containing the shorter poems in Elegy, along with a dozen or so of the longer poems now collected in The Darkening Trapeze.

  For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of editing The Darkening Trapeze was to be reminded again in Levis’s poetry what I’d already learned from a lifetime of conversations with Larry—that he was profoundly influenced by twentieth-century painting and photography and by world cinema as well. Fellini’s influence permeates the poem “La Strada,” and the haunted presences of Surrealist painters and writers echo throughout Levis’s wry poem, “Carte de l’Assassin à M. André Breton.” Yet these are only two examples. In his earlier poetry, Levis celebrates and engages, in some of his finest early work, the paintings of Caravaggio and Edward Hopper, as well as the remarkable photographs of Joseph Koudelka. Still, in the poems of The Darkening Trapeze, it is the influence of the English painter Francis Bacon that feels to me most constantly present and most powerfully resonant.

  In the spring of 1973, Larry and I were both living in Iowa City and saw each other nearly every day. After the release of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris—and its accompanying artistic and cultural shock waves—Larry and I would often return to one of our favorite conversations about the film: the ways in which the film’s opening credits (with its voluptuous, smoky score by Gato Barbieri) had so remarkably used two of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach and Study for a Portrait, not only to establish the visual palette for the film but also to set the stage emotionally, and to foreshadow the drama of the story to follow. For Larry, this seemed to provide poetic instruction as well, offering the beginnings of a much broader range of narrative possibilities that he would later employ; it was then, I believe, that Larry began to look for a more highly charged emotional valence in his poems. In my view, he continued this same reinvention of narrative strategies throughout the course of his poetry, honing it in the final poems we see in the book Elegy and, now, in The Darkening Trapeze. Many years later, Larry sent me a clipping about Bacon’s influence on Last Tango in Paris, from an interview with Bertolucci; it was a piece that seemed to Levis a confirmation of our talks, and it struck me that Bertolucci’s reflections could easily stand as an ars poetica for Larry’s late poems:

  When I
decided to make the movie, I took Vittorio Storaro [Bertolucci’s cinematographer] to see a Francis Bacon exhibition. I showed him the paintings, explaining that this was the kind of thing I wanted to use as my inspiration. The orange hues in the film are directly influenced by Bacon…. I then took Marlon Brando to see the same exhibition, and I showed him the paintings that you see at the start of the film, Portrait of Lucian Freud, and Study for Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne. I said to Marlon, “You see that painting? Well, I want you to recreate that same intense pain.” That was virtually the only direction I gave him on the film.

  Individually, in the spring of 1975, Larry and I both went to New York to see the astonishing Francis Bacon show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, afterwards exchanging now-lost postcards from the show. What I have returned to often while reading the poems of The Darkening Trapeze is the recognition that, even as his stylistic virtuosity reached its most dazzling peaks, the hues of Levis’s final poems repeatedly first flame then darken, often as if his speakers have been afire—a common trope in his late work—and are then slowly quenched by their pain.

  After I had completed editing this collection, I decided to ask Mary Flinn, Greg Donovan, and Amy Tudor if they might offer some recollections about their original work gathering Levis’s poems for that initial box of poems, especially as this took place so soon after his death. Tudor’s response led to a realization that there was a final poem—most likely the single last poem Larry ever completed in its entirety, a poem that had not been included in the original group of poems in that box—a poem that I had never seen. Amy recounted this story:

  Mary explained the system they’d started and then we worked together for a bit, talking here and there. Our goal was to try to decide which had been the most recent draft of a poem, either because the piece was dated in some way or because it showed a progression of some sort that seemed a newer version of the piece. I recall thinking that what we were going to be trying to do was attempt to parse and reconstruct Larry’s thinking process, his creative process, and how sometimes following a conversation with him could get a bit mysterious, so this seemed a hopeless task. But that’s what death gives you, I’ve come to think …