THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1991 by Philip Levine

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/

My thanks to the editors of the following publications in which these poems first appeared:

Antaeus (“Soloing”)

The Atlantic Monthly (“Among Children”)

The Georgia Review (“Coming Homeward from the Post Office”)

The Gettysburg Review (“The Seventh Summer”)

Michigan Quarterly Review (“My Grave”)

The New England Review (“The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka,” “Facts,” & “Coming of Age in Michigan”)

The New Yorker (“Fear and Fame,” “Coming Close,” “Fire,” “Every Blessed Day,” “What Work Is,” “Snails,” “Perennials,” “Above the World,” “M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School,” and “On the River”)

Poetry (“Burned” and “The Right Cross”)

Western Humanities Review (“Growth” and “Scouting”)

Zyzzyva (“Gin”)

My special thanks to my friends who helped me with these poems and encouraged me to complete them, especially to Larry Levis, Garrett Hongo, Edward Hirsch, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, and C.K. Williams.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levine, Philip, 1928–

What work is : poems / Philip Levine.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-76195-8

I. Title.

PS3562.E9W47      1991

811’.54—dc20                                       90–53421

Reprinted Twelve Times

v3.1

FOR LARRY LEVIS

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I

Fear and Fame

Coming Close

Fire

Every Blessed Day

Growth

Innocence

Coming Home from the Post Office

Among Children

What Work Is

II

Snails

My Grave

Agnus Dei

Facts

Gin

Perennials

Above the World

M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School

III

Burned

IV

Soloing

Scouting

Coming of Age in Michigan

The Right Cross

The Sweetness of Bobby Hefka

On the River

The Seventh Summer

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

I

FEAR AND FAME

Half an hour to dress, wide rubber hip boots,

gauntlets to the elbow, a plastic helmet

like a knight’s but with a little glass window

that kept steaming over, and a respirator

to save my smoke-stained lungs. I would descend

step by slow step into the dim world

of the pickling tank and there prepare

the new solutions from the great carboys

of acids lowered to me on ropes—all from a recipe

I shared with nobody and learned from Frank O’Mera

before he went off to the bars on Vernor Highway

to drink himself to death. A gallon of hydrochloric

steaming from the wide glass mouth, a dash

of pale nitric to bubble up, sulphuric to calm,

metals for sweeteners, cleansers for salts,

until I knew the burning stew was done.

Then to climb back, step by stately step, the adventurer

returned to the ordinary blinking lights

of the swingshift at Feinberg and Breslin’s

First-Rate Plumbing and Plating with a message

from the kingdom of fire. Oddly enough

no one welcomed me back, and I’d stand

fully armored as the downpour of cold water

rained down on me and the smoking traces puddled

at my feet like so much milk and melting snow.

Then to disrobe down to my work pants and shirt,

my black street shoes and white cotton socks,

to reassume my nickname, strap on my Bulova,

screw back my wedding ring, and with tap water

gargle away the bitterness as best I could.

For fifteen minutes or more I’d sit quietly

off to the side of the world as the women

polished the tubes and fixtures to a burnished purity

hung like Christmas ornaments on the racks

pulled steadily toward the tanks I’d cooked.

Ahead lay the second cigarette, held in a shaking hand,

as I took into myself the sickening heat to quell heat,

a lunch of two Genoa salami sandwiches and Swiss cheese

on heavy peasant bread baked by my Aunt Tsipie,

and a third cigarette to kill the taste of the others.

Then to arise and dress again in the costume

of my trade for the second time that night, stiffened

by the knowledge that to descend and rise up

from the other world merely once in eight hours is half

what it takes to be known among women and men.

COMING CLOSE

Take this quiet woman, she has been

standing before a polishing wheel

for over three hours, and she lacks

twenty minutes before she can take

a lunch break. Is she a woman?

Consider the arms as they press

the long brass tube against the buffer,

they are striated along the triceps,

the three heads of which clearly show.

Consider the fine dusting of dark down

above the upper lip, and the beads

of sweat that run from under the red

kerchief across the brow and are wiped

away with a blackening wrist band

in one odd motion a child might make

to say No! No! You must come closer

to find out, you must hang your tie

and jacket in one of the lockers

in favor of a black smock, you must

be prepared to spend shift after shift

hauling off the metal trays of stock,

bowing first, knees bent for a purchase,

then lifting with a gasp, the first word

of tenderness between the two of you,

then you must bring new trays of dull,

unpolished tubes. You must feed her,

as they say in the language of the place.

Make no mistake, the place has a language,

and if by some luck the power were cut,

the wheel slowed to a stop so that you

suddenly saw it was not a solid object

but so many separate bristles forming

in motion a perfect circle, she would turn

to you and say, “Why?” Not the old why

of why must I spend five nights a week?

Just, “Why?” Even if by some magic

you knew, you wouldn’t dare speak

for fear of her laughter, which now

you have anyway as she places the five

tapering fingers of her filthy hand

on the arm of your white shirt to mark

you for your own, now and forever.

FIRE

A fire burns along the eastern rim

of mountains. In the valley we

see it as a celestial prank, for

in the summer haze the mountains

themselves are lost, but as the night

deepens the fire grows more golden

and dense. On this calm ground

the raw raging of burning winds

that cuts the eyes and singes the hair

is seen as a pencil-line of light

moving southward. I know my son

is there, has been for four days,

moved in and out by helicopters

with his squad of fire fighters.

By now, without sleep, they’ve

gone beyond exhaustion. Some can’t

waken, some are crazed, a few go

on—the oldest—working steadily.

I know this from the stories he

has told me of other famous fires

from which he returned as from

a dream, his eyes glazed with seeing,

his sense of time and place gone.

He would raise his shaking right arm

above his head, and with his palm

open sweep it toward me again

and again and speak without grammar,

sometimes without words, of what

had taken place. I knew it was true.

Now in the cool of evening I catch

a hint of the forest, of that taking

of sudden breath that pines demand;

it’s on my skin, a light oil, a sweat

born of some forgotten leaning into fire.

EVERY BLESSED DAY

First with a glass of water

tasting of iron and then

with more and colder water

over his head he gasps himself

awake. He hears the cheep

of winter birds searching

the snow for crumbs of garbage

and knows exactly how much light

and how much darkness is there

before the dawn, gray and weak,

slips between the buildings.

Closing the door behind him,

he thinks of places he

has never seen but heard

about, of the great desert

his father said was like

no sea he had ever crossed

and how at dusk or dawn

it held all the shades of red

and blue in its merging shadows,

and though his life was then

a prison he had come to live

for these suspended moments.

Waiting at the corner he feels

the cold at his back and stamps

himself awake again. Seven miles

from the frozen, narrow river.

Even before he looks he knows

the faces on the bus, some

going to work and some coming back,

but each sealed in its hunger

for a different life, a lost life.

Where he’s going or who he is

he doesn’t ask himself, he

doesn’t know and doesn’t know

it matters. He gets off

at the familiar corner, crosses

the emptying parking lots

toward Chevy Gear & Axle # 3.

In a few minutes he will hold

his time card above a clock,

and he can drop it in

and hear the moment crunching

down, or he can not, for

either way the day will last

forever. So he lets it fall.

If he feels the elusive calm

his father spoke of and searched

for all his short life, there’s

no way of telling, for now he’s

laughing among them, older men

and kids. He’s saying, “Damn,

we’ve got it made.” He’s

lighting up or chewing with

the others, thousands of miles

from their forgotten homes, each

and every one his father’s son.

GROWTH

In the soap factory where I worked

when I was fourteen, I spoke to

no one and only one man spoke

to me and then to command me

to wheel the little cars of damp chips

into the ovens. While the chips dried

I made more racks, nailing together

wood lath and ordinary screening

you’d use to keep flies out, racks

and more racks each long afternoon,

for this was a growing business

in a year of growth. The oil drums

of fat would arrive each morning,

too huge for me to tussle with,

reeking of the dark, cavernous

kitchens of the Greek and Rumanian

restaurants, of cheap hamburger joints,

White Towers and worse. They would

sulk in the battered yard behind

the plant until my boss, Leo,

the squat Ukrainian dollied them in

to become, somehow, through the magic

of chemistry, pure soap. My job

was always the racks and the ovens—

two low ceilinged metal rooms

the color of sick skin. When I

slid open the heavy doors my eyes

started open, the pores

of my skull shrivelled, and sweat

smelling of scared animal burst from

me everywhere. Head down I entered,

first to remove what had dried

and then to wheel in the damp, raw

yellow curls of new soap, grained

like iris petals or unseamed quartz.

Then out to the open weedy yard

among the waiting and emptied drums

where I hammered and sawed, singing

my new life of working and earning,

outside in the fresh air of Detroit

in 1942, a year of growth.

INNOCENCE

Side by side against the trunks of the gray oaks

that lined US 24 we sat while Michelangelo concocted

from tomatoes, hot peppers, onions, salami,

his long blade flashing along the blocks of cheese,

laying the slices precisely down the two slabs

of coarse white bread crafted from a single loaf.

Seriously and in silence we watched, and when he raised

the huge original sandwich to the first bite,

we raised our quarts of milk in a dumb salute

to the sullen gods of time for a thank you

for our mid-day rest. Our Michelangelo was not

the painter, long dead and forgotten by those

beside the road to Toledo during the summer of ’50

just before the republic went back to its wars,

but Michelangelo the furious lopper of tree limbs

who leapt all day from branch to leafy branch

to strip those poor old oaks before the earthmovers

dragged them down so that there might be

two smooth new concrete lanes all the way

to the empires of Ohio. (It’s there now, the road,

a permanent work of the human imagination,

lined colorfully as all great ways must be,

with the arches of triumph over good taste.)

Each noon Michelangelo told the same joyous tales

of surrender to the 3rd Army Corps in North Africa,

as though he personally had handed over his sword

to Omar Bradley, and then the long sea voyage

to serene Michigan and his second Italian family,

the prosperous cousins in complicated brickwork,

experts in drainage, masters of tree removal

whose thankful apprentice he now was.

We toasted the girls who each night lavished

their cares on his long knotted body topped

perfectly with a roof of black curly thatch.

We even lied back in return, inventing squadrons

of blondes and serious brunettes driven by love

to wait on our doorsteps until we returned

by bus, filthy and broken by the long days

of breaking the earth, women with new cars

and old needs content to take their turns.

Michelangelo would smile, the wise European

come to these innocent shores in a time

of innocence. Later, when the yellow Le Tourneau

earthmovers gripped the chained and stripped trunks,

hunched down and roared their engines, the earth

held and trembled before it gave, and the stumps

howled as they turned their black, prized groins

skyward for the first times in their lives,

turned and rocked back and forth just once

in the heavy wet dirt of late afternoon.

We smiled, not to hide our tears from ourselves

or each other, but because the day was ending,

if there were lamentations they were not ours

but the starlings gathering in the oaks,

the starlings and bobolinks and the vireos

chanting and bowing in the darkening branches

all along the road to Ohio and the coming night.

COMING HOME FROM THE POST OFFICE

On Sunday night we would

see the women returning

from an evening with God,

their faces glowing with faith

and the hard sweat of their faith.

They would sing separately

or together, and when the bus

stopped and one got carefully

off the sisters would shout

news of the good days ahead

and the joys of handmaidenship.

I remember an evening in April

when I passed in and out of

sleep, and the woman who stood

above me stared into my eyes

as though searching for a sign

that might bring light softly

falling among the dark houses

we stuttered by. When I closed

my eyes I saw cards, letters,

small packages, each bearing

a particular name and some

burden of grief or tidings

of loss. Names like my own

passed moment by moment

into the gray sacks that slumped

open mouthed. On strong legs

she stood easily, swaying

from side to side, a woman

in a green suit, a purse held

in one hand, a hankie folded

in the other. Her pale eyes

held mine easily each time

I wakened, and so I wakened

not into the colorless light

from overhead but into

the twin mysteries of a life

in God. When I fell back

into my light sleep I saw

a great clear river running

between the houses I knew

and a bright shore of temples,

glowing public squares, children

in long robes flowing, those I

loved climbing a high hill

toward a new sun. Hours later

the driver softly wakened

me with a hand on my head

and a single word, and I

stepped lightly into the world,

my shoulders hunched, my collar

turned up against the hour,

and headed down the still street.

The new spring winds groaned

around me, the distant light

of no new star marked me home.

AMONG CHILDREN

I walk among the rows of bowed heads—

the children are sleeping through fourth grade

so as to be ready for what is ahead,

the monumental boredom of junior high

and the rush forward tearing their wings

loose and turning their eyes forever inward.

These are the children of Flint, their fathers

work at the spark plug factory or truck

bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs

to the widows of the suburbs. You can see

already how their backs have thickened,

how their small hands, soiled by pig iron,

leap and stutter even in dreams. I would like

to sit down among them and read slowly

from The Book of Job until the windows

pale and the teacher rises out of a milky sea

of industrial scum, her gowns streaming

with light, her foolish words transformed

into song, I would like to arm each one

with a quiver of arrows so that they might

rush like wind there where no battle rages

shouting among the trumpets, Ha! Ha!

How dear the gift of laughter in the face

of the 8 hour day, the cold winter mornings

without coffee and oranges, the long lines

of mothers in old coats waiting silently

where the gates have closed. Ten years ago

I went among these same children, just born,

in the bright ward of the Sacred Heart and leaned

down to hear their breaths delivered that day,

burning with joy. There was such wonder

in their sleep, such purpose in their eyes

closed against autumn, in their damp heads

blurred with the hair of ponds, and not one

turned against me or the light, not one

said, I am sick, I am tired, I will go home,

not one complained or drifted alone,

unloved, on the hardest day of their lives.

Eleven years from now they will become

the men and women of Flint or Paradise,

the majors of a minor town, and I

will be gone into smoke or memory,

so I bow to them here and whisper

all I know, all I will never know.

WHAT WORK IS

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

You rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it’s someone else’s brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, “No,

we’re not hiring today,” for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who’s not beside you or behind or

ahead because he’s home trying to

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don’t know what work is.

II

SNAILS

The leaves rusted in the late winds

of September, the ash trees bowed

to no one I could see. Finches

quarrelled among the orange groves.

I was about to say something final

that would capture the meaning

of autumn’s arrival, something

suitable for bronzing,

something immediately recognizable

as so large a truth it’s totally untrue,

when one small white cloud—not much

more than the merest fragment of mist—

passed between me and the pale

thin cuticle of the mid-day moon

come out to see the traffic and dust

of Central California. I kept quiet.

The wind stilled, and I could hear

the even steady ticking of the leaves,

the lawn’s burned hay gasping

for breath, the pale soil rising

only to fall between earth and heaven,

if heaven’s there. The world would escape

to become all it’s never been

if only we would let it go

streaming toward a future without

purpose or voice. In shade the ground

darkens, and now the silver trails

stretch from leaf to chewed off leaf

of the runners of pumpkin to disappear

in the cover of sheaves and bowed grass.

On the fence blue trumpets of glory

almost closed—music to the moon,

laughter to us, they blared all day

though no one answered, no one

could score their sense or harmony

before they faded in the wind and sun.

MY GRAVE

Just outside Malaga, California,

lost among the cluster of truckstops

there is a little untended plot

of ground and weeds and a stone

that bears my name, misspelled,

and under the stone is dirt, hardpan,

more dirt, rocks, then one hundred

and one different elements

embracing each other in every way

they can imagine so that at times

they remind me of those photographs

I saw as a boy and which I was assured

were expensive and stimulating

and meant nothing. There are also

over a thousand beer bottle caps

one of my sons was saving until

he calculated that he would never

reach a million and so quit. (Quit

saving, not drinking.) One document

is here, ceremoniously labeled

“My Last Will & Testament.” My sister

so hated it she threw it into

the bare hole and asked that it be

shovelled under. Not one foolish hope

of mine is here, for none was real

and hard, the hope that the poor

stalked from their cardboard houses

to transform our leaders, that our flags

wept colored tears until they became

nothing but flags of surrender.

I hoped also to see my mother

a long distance runner, my brother

give his money to the kids of Chicago

and take to the roads, carless, hatless,

in search of a task that befits a man.

I dreamed my friends quit lying

and their breath took on the perfume

of new-mown grass, and that I came

to be a man walking carelessly

through rain, my hair tangled, my one

answer the full belly laugh I saved

for my meeting with God, a laugh I

no longer need. Not one nightmare

is here, nor are my eyes which saw

you rise at night, barefoot and quiet,

and leave my side, and my ears which heard

you return suddenly, your mouth tasting

of cold water. Even my forehead

is not here, behind which I plotted

the overthrow of this our republic

by means of the refusal to wipe.

My journals aren’t here, my right hand

that wrote them, my waist that strained

against so many leather belts and belts

of cloth that finally surrendered.

My enormous feet that carried me safely

through thirty cities, my tongue

that stroked and restroked your cheek

roughly until you said, “Cat.” My poems,

my lies, my few kept promises, my love

for morning sunlight and dusk, my love

for women and the children of women,

my guiding star and the star I wore

for twenty seven years. Nothing of me

is here because this is not my house,

this is not the driver’s seat of my car

nor the memory of someone who loved me

nor that distant classroom in which I

fell asleep and dreamed of lamb. This

is dirt, a filled hole of earth, stone

that says return to stone, a broken fence

that mumbles Keep Out, air above nothing,

air that cannot imagine the sweet duties

of wildflowers and herbs, this is cheap,

common, coarse, what you pass by

every day in your car without a thought,

this is an ordinary grave.

AGNUS DEI

My little sister created the Lamb of God.

She made him out of used-up dust mops

and coat hangers. She left him whitewashed

at the entrance to the Calvin Coolidge branch

of the public library, so as to scare

the lady librarian who’d clucked at each of us,

“Why do you want to read a grown-up book?”

The lamb sagged against the oaken doors,

high and dark in the deep vault of morning,

and said nothing as we scampered off

across the dew-wet lawns, our shoes darkening.

The rest of our adventure made the Times,

how Officer German took in the lamb and made

a morning meal of milk and mucilage

and wrapped him warmly in out-of-town papers.

How he slept unnoticed for hours and wakening

rose in a shower of golden dust, bellowing

in rage, and sent Miss Greenglass running

to the Ladies Restroom where she fainted

and, waking, changed her life. Books scattered.

There was weeping and gnashing. The lamb escaped

through an expensive, leaded windowpane

and entered the late afternoon flying low

over the houses of the middle class

until clouds obscured the world, and it was done.

My brother Leopold read this all out loud

on Sunday morning while our parents slept

above us in a high dark room we never entered,

and the cellar moaned and rumbled, warming

us the best it could. A fresh wind rapped

at the front windows, and we stared in silence

as, bloodred and wrinkled, the new elm unleaved

in public, shuddering with the ache of its growing.

FACTS

The bus station in Princeton, New Jersey,

has no men’s room. I had to use one like mad,

but the guy behind the counter said, “Sorry,

but you know what goes on in bus station men’s rooms.”

If you take a ’37 Packard grill and split it down

the center and reduce the angle by 18° and reweld it,

you’ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce

just in case you ever need a new grill for yours.

I was not born in Cleveland, Ohio. Other people

were, or so I have read, and many have remained,

which strikes me as an exercise in futility

greater even than saving your pennies to buy a Rolls.

F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton. A student

pointed out the windows of the suite he occupied.

We were on our way to the train station to escape

to New York City, and the student may have been lying.

The train is called “The Dinky.” It takes you only

a few miles away to a junction where you can catch

a train to Grand Central or—if you’re scared—

to Philadelphia. From either you can reach Cleveland.

My friend Howie wrote me that he was ashamed

to live in a city whose most efficient means of escape

is called “The Dinky.” If he’d invest in a Rolls,

even one with a Packard grill, he’d feel differently.

I don’t blame the student for lying, especially

to a teacher. He may have been ill at ease

in my company, for I am an enormous man given

to long bouts of silence as I brood on facts.

There are two lies in the previous stanza. I’m small,

each year I feel the bulk of me shrinking, becoming

more frail and delicate. I get cold easily as though

I lacked even the solidity to protect my own heart.

The coldest I’ve ever been was in Cleveland, Ohio.

My host and hostess hated and loved each other

by frantic turns. To escape I’d go on long walks

in the yellowing snow as the evening winds raged.

The citizens of Cleveland, Ohio, passed me sullenly,

benighted in their Rolls Royces, each in a halo

of blue light sifting down from the abandoned

filling stations of what once was a community.

I will never return to Cleveland or Princeton, not

even to pay homage to Hart Crane’s lonely tower

or the glory days of John Berryman, whom I loved.

I haven’t the heart for it. Not even in your Rolls.

GIN

The first time I drank gin

I thought it must be hair tonic.

My brother swiped the bottle

from a guy whose father owned

a drug store that sold booze

in those ancient, honorable days

when we acknowledged the stuff

was a drug. Three of us passed

the bottle around, each tasting

with disbelief. People paid

for this? People had to have

it, the way we had to have

the women we never got near.

(Actually they were girls, but

never mind, the important fact

was their impenetrability.)

Leo, the third foolish partner,

suggested my brother should have

swiped Canadian whiskey or brandy,

but Eddie defended his choice

on the grounds of the expressions

“gin house” and “gin lane,” both

of which indicated the preeminence

of gin in the world of drinking,

a world we were entering without

understanding how difficult

exit might be. Maybe the bliss

that came with drinking came

only after a certain period

of apprenticeship. Eddie likened

it to the holy man’s self-flagellation

to experience the fullness of faith.

(He was very well read for a kid

of fourteen in the public schools.)

So we dug in and passed the bottle

around a second time and then a third,

in the silence each of us expecting

some transformation. “You get used

to it,” Leo said. “You don’t

like it but you get used to it.”

I know now that brain cells

were dying for no earthly purpose,

that three boys were becoming

increasingly despiritualized

even as they took into themselves

these spirits, but I thought then

I was at last sharing the world

with the movie stars, that before

long I would be shaving because

I needed to, that hair would

sprout across the flat prairie

of my chest and plunge even

to my groin, that first girls

and then women would be drawn

to my qualities. Amazingly, later

some of this took place, but

first the bottle had to be

emptied, and then the three boys

had to empty themselves of all

they had so painfully taken in

and by means even more painful

as they bowed by turns over

the eye of the toilet bowl

to discharge their shame. Ahead

lay cigarettes, the futility

of guaranteed programs of

exercise, the elaborate lies

of conquest no one believed,

forms of sexual torture and

rejection undreamed of. Ahead

lay our fifteenth birthdays,

acne, deodorants, crabs, salves,

butch haircuts, draft registration,

the military and political victories

of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us

Richard Nixon with wife and dog.

Any wonder we tried gin.

PERENNIALS

Winter. The marketplace of the village

of Fuengirola. A tattered mongrel,

tan, brown, and black with a white muzzle.

The stubby, bowed forelegs set apart

in a stance suitable for a short advance

or a sudden retreat. I know this beast,

I think, I know this dirty, box-like head

ringed with curls, this dry, foolish bark

that scares off nothing. “Marilyn,” I say,

remembering one who scorned me years before.

Each day my son John calls out, “Marilyn!”

as stamping we wait our turn in line

before the black oildrums of burning fat

where the churros fry. “Marilyn,” he calls

until she comes to beg bread from his hand.

*

Under the windows onto the gray yard

a green glass wine bottle with one branch

of blood-tipped bursting plum. The odor

of mid-summer hanging in winter.

The room thickens around the living core

as I pass and stop. Where was I going

that I should ignore the heart of my house,

this new intruder come in another

dark season to tell me the year won’t wait?

I was on the way to the kitchen

for a glass of water, and now I have wine.

I was looking for a brown paper sack

of sleep, an old pillow of forgetting,

a way out before the world got in,

and found the dining room in riot

from one black branch as arched as I.

ABOVE THE WORLD

Up through miles of twisting pines, past

a town of brightly painted caves, their windows

curtained and open, the doors ajar revealing

the heavy furniture of entrepreneurs, carpets,

television sets; on the roofs, antennas poking

in all directions and the day’s laundry strung

from cave to cave. Up another hour or more

winding through dense woods to a high plateau,

then truck farms greening in December, fenced

fields of grazing cattle right to the outskirts

of the new town, raw, unfinished, with wide streets

of crowded shops hawking garter belts, canes,

fountain pens, goatskin jackets, peeled rabbits.

The women, in dark print dresses, clutched

their leather purses with both hands, the men

smoked in small circles. At the center, a maze

of wires and tracks sprouting from a compound

of ancient trolleys leaning into silence,

their windows gone, the cane seats unravelling,

the paint cracked and flaking. One road led

up the mountain, and we took it and left

the trucks, the clouds of black soot, the roar

of motorcycles to enter something

far older, and found the place and parked.

We registered at the Hotel of Heaven,

a father, a mother, three upright blond sons

in American jeans, blue-eyed and suspicious.

Would my kids now remember the parapets

that hung out over the edge of the world

that spread before us—the fabled Mare Nostrum

we never saw—as everything below dissolved

in smoke and dust? The tangled gardens

of a long-gone magistrate, their paths clogged

with weeds, the roses blown and climbing

everywhere, the famous court of stone lions

each as large and fierce as a happy dog,

each facing away from his brothers to guard

nothing from no one. Even the tall, graying

Englishman stooped before his easel was not

a dream, nor was the painting itself, still

largely canvas, though it caught the green

exactly, shadowed with black, and a sky

of distant clouds, small and bored,

floating away. That man would be ninety

or older now and still at the task

of rendering the magic and nonsense of lives

lived at great height, still not answering

the unanswerable questions of high mist,

brain cells fighting for breath, our bondage

to a line of perfect crows marking the way up.

Make no mistake, for even here you could still

go up along ragged stone trails that wound

their way into a gray world and from there

into thin air. Or you could descend

in summer to the music of water on the narrow

cobbled streets, or in silent December,

as we did, the mother leading the way,

the father taking up the rear in Spanish style,

laboring over a newspaper of local filth.

There was darkness. It fell even before

the cold fell, even before the late sun

vanished behind the mountains, it fell

into the corners of sight slowly

like stained snow. In the restaurant

there was more cold and darkness. A fine layer

of dust had settled on plates and silverware.

I wondered if anyone else saw it

sifting down but was scared to ask. One rear door

stood open on the night, though no animals

entered or left. We sent the soup back,

a clear broth of boiled water dotted

with islands of fat. We tried the bread

that gleamed like old china, we even tried

the thin burned steaks. We tried. And then

we walked the streets to a little square

where the children sold white paper dolls

you could explode with a lighted cigarette

and necklaces of wooden beads meant

for Christmas angels, who were sure to come,

for everything is answered in the Old World,

the Gypsy peddler told us as he wrapped

the chestnuts six to a triangled pack,

his stubby burned fingers working deftly.

“Everything!” he promised. I turned away

from the laughter and threats, turned away

from my wife and kids. Suddenly alone,

believing he was right, I turned to behold

the sky I’d always lived under bulging

with huge, unfamiliar stars closer

than I’d ever seen them and moving, frozen,

in that ancient, secret dance. Who could

have guessed how everything was answered

before the night ended? At the hotel a room

for each of us, windowless and sealed,

a private cell for sleep or prayer,

and seven more for those who never came—

a dozen tiny rooms in all, circling

a low-ceilinged common room that held

one great round table with attendant chairs,

equitably, as they never are in this life.

Beside the table and below the portrait

of God, the iron stove a boy filled with twigs,

broken crates, garbage, while we watched.

This, too, was answered. The grandfather,

smiling sideways at his audience, lit the blaze

and leaped back, laughing, for even here

above the world we would have all that night,

even unto the clear break of day, steam heat.

M. DEGAS TEACHES ART & SCIENCE AT DURFEE INTERMEDIATE SCHOOL Detroit, 1942

He made a line on the blackboard,

one bold stroke from right to left

diagonally downward and stood back

to ask, looking as always at no one

in particular, “What have I done?”

From the back of the room Freddie

shouted, “You’ve broken a piece

of chalk.” M. Degas did not smile.

“What have I done?” he repeated.

The most intellectual students

looked down to study their desks

except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised

her hand before she spoke. “M. Degas,

you have created the hypotenuse

of an isosceles triangle.” Degas mused.

Everyone knew that Gertrude could not

be incorrect. “It is possible,”

Louis Warshowsky added precisely,

“that you have begun to represent

the roof of a barn.” I remember

that it was exactly twenty minutes

past eleven, and I thought at worst

this would go on another forty

minutes. It was early April,

the snow had all but melted on

the playgrounds, the elms and maples

bordering the cracked walks shivered

in the new winds, and I believed

that before I knew it I’d be

swaggering to the candy store

for a Milky Way. M. Degas

pursed his lips, and the room

stilled until the long hand

of the clock moved to twenty one

as though in complicity with Gertrude,

who added confidently, “You’ve begun

to separate the dark from the dark.”

I looked back for help, but now

the trees bucked and quaked, and I

knew this could go on forever.

III

BURNED

I have to go back into the forge room

at Chevy where Lonnie still calls

out his commands to Sweet Pea and Packy

and stare into the fire

until my eyes are also fire

and tear away some piece of my face

because we’re all burning in the blood

and it’s too late.

I have to walk

the long road from here to Bessemer,

Alabama, and arrive on a June night in ’48

after work when the men have crowded

around a stalled car and tell them

there’s no place to go and

let them take turns beating me

with hands turned to pig iron.

I have to

climb the shaking ladder to the roof

of the Nitro plant and tear off

my respirator and breathe the yellow air

the Chaldeans called “the air you must not breathe,”

and sing in the voices

of my fathers calling the children

into prayer while below the stubby canisters

pass labelled, “Chicago,” “Amsterdam,”

“Belsen,” “Toronto.”

I have to swim out

into the flat waters of the great sea

at dawn when the small fishing boats

are coming in and climb aboard the one

with the face of a goddess and the tail

of a goat and let my left cheek

brush against the rough, unshaven cheek

of the old man whose tears—mixed with wine—

watered the beach twenty one years ago.

And

keep going past the last marker

until I am lost forever, until the sea

and the sky are one, the waves have ceased,

no tide pulls us toward

the cries of the drowned.

I have to climb

the slag hills again, but this time not

as a child, and look out over the river of iron,

and hold it all in my eyes,

the river, the iron mountains, the factories

where our brothers burned. I have to repeat

the prayer that we will all go back

to earth one day soon to become earth,

that our tears will run to the sea

a last time and open it, and our fires

light the way back home for someone.

*

In the fullness of a season someone

had to go first into the other kingdom.

Summer in Detroit. The light scattered

into tiny flares at the end of a day

of hard work. Stanley walked his dog,

talking as always to himself, Dorothy

sat on the front porch alone, excited

by the knowledge of her changing body.

Blocks away Leo read The Tempest slowly

to himself, stopping now and then to announce

a line out loud—“Thy turfy mountains

where live nibbling sheep”—, his skin

chilled with the glory of language.

I have not brought them together

so their hearts might stutter or stop

with love they can’t bear. It is 1944,

Moradian has landed on a Pacific atoll

to become his life forever, Esther’s husband

sees the Sherman twenty yards ahead

go up in a flash and knows his is next.

Past midnight Bernard and Arthur vow

to give themselves to music and to poetry.

I do not call out, I do not step forward

out of the chaos of my 16 years to ask

to take their place. I’m too young,

too exhausted, too busy. In the kitchen

I stand at the counter slicing cheese,

salami, rye bread, spreading mayonnaise,

tamping down the lettuce, wrapping

the sandwiches carefully in waxed paper

for tomorrow’s lunch the exact way

my grandmother taught me years before,

humming one of my grandfather’s tunes,

one he groans out when he sings himself

to sleep, tapping his foot, swinging

from side to side as though he were burning.

*

A burned car left in a field

of sassafras, the long green shoots

through the windows and doors where no

doors remain. The kids don’t come by

after school to carve their names

on the dashboard or pull the steering wheel

to avoid the inevitable. Rocks, tires,

cases of empties, an old couch sagging

into weeds, the cushions blooming.

I lived here once, in a house

now gone. A friend visited me

at dusk, and she brought a paper parcel

of cookies tied with a ribbon. Even then

we were scared of the silence that followed

whatever we gave each other. I would

walk her to the bus stop on Second Avenue,

and we’d wait in silence in the dense air

of a March night as slow rain

fell into the last snow. I’d come back

alone, sober, singing to a starless sky,

singing recklessly out of a boy’s

throat, past the darkened rows

of sleeping two storey houses

that have all gone up in smoke.

*

Yom Kippur

in the New World.

Los Angeles hums

a little tune—

trucks down

the coast road

for Monday market

packed with small faces

blinking in the dark.

My mother dreams

by the open window.

On the drainboard

the gray roast humps

untouched, the oven

bangs its iron jaws,

but it’s over.

Before her on the table

set for so many

her glass of fire

goes out.

The childish photographs,

the letters and cards

scatter at last.

The dead burn alone

toward dawn.

*

Why am I going away from the glass of wine

from the loaf of bread

Why am I not mourning the tiny death

of the sparrow

who leaped on the lowest branches

of the atlas cedar

until one afternoon he was drawn

into tall burning grass

What will I say when the nights grow

longer and longer

the dawn is barely visible, a grudging

of yellow light

The day dies into the violet halos

of exhaust

No one takes my hand and leads me to bed

to the mouth to mouth agonies of darkness

When this passes

how will I know I was and I was alive

Who will take my hand

smelling of earth and

burning now to autumnal rust

Who will lead me to the ceremonies of sorrow

who will lead me

*

I was burned,

she said, and lifted her blouse to show

me the curious pale mottling along

the lines of her belly, still smooth. “He

said he adored my white skin, creamy.

Can a Jew imagine what a real

white woman looks like all over? All

your life you dream of someone like me,

every night of your life.” Her green eyes

on fire with her own memories

of herself 40 years ago. She shakes her head

awake and still goes on. “Not with cigarettes,

you moron, would a man like that, richer

than God, burn his only beloved with

cigarettes? Cigars, imported Havanas, nothing

but the best!”

And she’s gone, thank God,

slamming the door on me, gone back

to the one life she clings to. The room

is quiet, ashamed, the books gawk down

from their shelves, not one

with a word to tell me what it is like

to enter the fires of your own making, naked,

day after day, until the burning becomes

a sweetness.

*

The day you left I walked

alone for hours down the crowded streets

hearing and seeing no one until I

caught the cries of a drunken woman

behind me. She had lost her husband,

left him in a bar, was alone, frightened,

calling for help. I kept walking

with her behind me, calling.

The houses along the canals were closing

up, turning their eyes inward,

listening to the rumbling of their fires

or their human groans. This day will end,

I told myself, this pain will pass.

I will waken to my life. The evening

spread from the great oaks

that lined the emptying boulevards

or descended in bits of ashes and dust

from a deepening sky. I turned at last

to behold the woman whose grief

was louder than mine. There was

only a child, her right hand closed

tight on a handkerchief, knotted at one end

with some coins and a note, a little girl

who seeing my eyes filled with tears

began to cry as she smiled.

*

Two ten-inch phonograph records, Bluebirds,

going white, that won’t give up their music.

My uncle’s perfect cloth bound book

that opened the secret of electric growth.

My mother’s gap-toothed tortoise combs.

My father’s Victoria Cross he brought back

from an automobile parts convention

in Chicago. His white gold pocket watch,

a Howard, that runs and stops and runs

to keep his time. His naturalization papers

claiming he was born in 1898 in Poland,

without a single mention of his years at war.

My brother’s smeared grade school drawings

of Spitfires, Stukas, ME 109s,

his “Withdrawal from Dunkirk,” the beach

crisscrossed with small black lines

that could be abandoned arms or the arms

of boys hugging. My stillborn sister’s

wish to walk with us on Sunday afternoons,

to breathe the stained air that blows

in at dusk from the parking lots,

to mother a child. Your finger prints

on the final application for release.

A bitten fountain pen, a dry stamp pad.

Two clear drops of fluid that catch

and hold the artificial light, that glow

with their own light when that’s gone

as eyes in stories are said to do.

Now in the dark they could be you,

they could be me, they could be anyone.

*

I stop at the borders of dreams.

I ask who you are, whispering

in my ear all these years, you

to whom I’ve said all I can say.

I hold my two hands upward

toward the light now sifting

from the air. That is the shape

of eternity: five long fingers

and a palm broadened and carved

by use. When I looked

in my heart and found only

questions, when I walked

beside the ditch at dusk

and asked the sun,

the answer was curled

quietly in my pocket. “Look at

them both,” you say, “turn them

over and place them on the table

before you. Don’t be afraid.

They are you, familiar, at times

overlooked, despised. Now,

go back the way you came, down

the same old streets where you

grew to a name and a single face.

That was home, you said, and today

it is nothing, not even a closet

of unread books. Here is home.

Close your eyes. You are on

a dark plain. The hot winds

breathe in and out. You’re laughing!

You asked for a home, you crossed

the earth, you sat speechless,

you questioned the closed door,

‘Are you there?’ No one answered

because all the time it was you.”

*

If I called you “my soul,” you’d

laugh in my face. If I went

down on my knees to you as to

a god or a beloved, you’d turn

to the window, shake your head,

and talk to the last of the garden.

At the end of September I may

ask the trees to hold still

in the west wind. I may scold

the flicker hiding in the shade

of an orange tree. His feathers

scatter and settle in the trough

of each wave. He is not

a religious object nor is

the wind sacred, smelling

as it does of cold salt

and sea life. I have been here

so long the bleached hairs

quivering on my hands remember

the years before the flood.

The whites of my eyes, no longer

white, stared into fire when fire

was mine, and I am only

so much salt, water, and stone

smelling of iron. I can talk

to you and though my answers

will scatter like feathers in wind,

you may write them down on paper

that burns even in sunlight.

Get what you can, says the flicker;

remorseless, he shoulders his way

into light and then into air.

What does he care that the year

winds down? That the west wind

smells of ice? That what went out

as lies and so much bad breath

came home as the final truth?

*

The outskirts of our least favorite city,

the one bombed and burned from the inside

by its own citizens—along the fence

small climbing roses bloom in April,

the hardier ones hang on long

past the better days, and late autumn

brings tiny crystals glistening

on the cheeks of the blackened petals.

Spading the gray soil, I think

of begonias and how their buds redden

even without rain and of the wild iris—

flags we called them—that won’t live

in the rich beds though they survive

fire and hail outbattling tough weeds

to spring up where houses once were.

Poking among these ruins for rocks

for the garden, I unearth bricks

from a familiar fireplace or a slab

of stone that crowned a hearth, remnants

of my lost neighbors. Spilling

the kernels of carrot seeds

into my palm and the black pips

of radishes, I know something

will come from this root and wood

thickened ground. With a stick I scrape

a trough for planting. I remember

the unloved lamb become a sheep I saw

on his way to slaughter. Like me, he shook

his lowered head as though he knew

the way home, that head dirty with curls.

*

I was small once, hardly bigger

than the laughter of a lemon and like

a lemon I had come into a life

no one would question, an oily rind,

closed volumes of flesh, and seeds

as smooth as pearls. Even then

you could talk, you were immense

with the desire to touch each leaf,

each small animal that rose

from his lair. Later,

even you who could love rind,

seeds, oil, flesh, let your name

slip from your tongue to become

nonsense, let salt rain down

into the fields and surrendered

all you’d seen, you who had

eaten the earth gave back ashes.

So, it is time we left.

Take the small, empty purse

your mother carried across an ocean,

take the little book of songs

the children taught you, take

your teeth and your fingernails

and the white scars on your belly

and meet me where the road

vanishes into the hillside.

How will you know me?

I won’t be tall or dressed

for dinner or carrying a dark bag,

I won’t be whistling like a bird

or your father coming home from work,

I won’t be anyone you ever

spoke to or fell asleep beside

or wakened to. I won’t be sorry

for you, I won’t take your hand

or come forward and touch

your hair or kiss your cheek.

There, between the two sullen elms

without leaves, the ones that died

years ago, do you see a shadow?

It could be the birth we gave

back to the rain. It could be

the silence after love or just pain

without hope or the need to dance.

It looks alive, even in the darkness,

it looks as though it were growing

smaller and smaller, but it’s

not a patch of snow. It could be

a whisper, a secret never kept,

everything your heart knew

and you forgot. Don’t ask.

*

Give me your hand, and I’ll count

each finger twice and put them to sleep

with a name more cold and remote

than a star’s. They don’t move,

not even to breathe, not even

to search for water or to embrace

another hand. This is the way

things become as we return closer

and closer to air that simply is,

stained by a day not yet here.

A woman gets out of bed and goes

to the window to see if the birds

have wakened and sees the houses

have gone, the trees have turned

inward to become so many pages

unmarked by mistakes. She says

nothing to herself. She makes the bed

and washes the one plate, the cup,

the little spoon and fork. She dries

them carefully and lets them fall

one by one into the garbage.

*

Here it comes.

It’s been quiet. If you’d bothered

you’d have heard finches in the trees

and the wind sighing out back and wires

humming in the voices of wire, you

could have heard a country asleep

except for the people down under

stoking the furnaces and the ones

way up changing the light bulbs.

No more. Because here it is,

the big wave the moon’s been holding

back and the Rocky Mountains

of ice water. Now the clouds of locusts

waiting since Genesis sweep over Kansas

and eat wheat and carry off the cows.

And the constant hum? It’s California

on its knees chanting to keep safe

our vintage wines and swimming pools,

the false Gods of our movies

and the true dead ones in our hearts.

Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City,

Detroit, Washington, gone to sea.

Now you can hear again, finches

in the golden voices of finch, the wind

saying it best as only the old wind

can, blowing over the centuries of nothing,

blowing every which way it wants, blowing.

*

Once in a park in Paris an old woman

seized two coins nesting on my open palm.

I grabbed the offending hand, closed

now like a tiny steel cage, and twisted

while she gasped and tore at my hand

with her nails. At last one dark tear

dripped from her nose and the two coins fell

into the grass. When I put a shoe over them

she cried to the low clouds scudding overhead

that all men were strangers and sons of whores.

Leaving the coins, I stood and walked away.

I did not have to turn to know that smile—

I’d seen it on my own face, I’d known

the same hump in my shoulders, the cold

gleaming in my eyes, and wanted not to see.

“What if grass were bread?” my son asked me

a week before when the plane broke through

the dense rain and we beheld the green world.

I had no answer. When we landed

I bought money with money, forgetting

that each dollar spent was so much time

staring into faces that answered nothing.

Later, in the hotel, my kids played

with the elevator until the old concierge

hissed at them in French, and they roared

out the laughter of boys and refused to stop.

When he came to my door to complain

I answered that in the West grass was bread.

He held his pudgy hands over his breast

to deliver his truths of waste and use.

How many years had he gone faithfully

from room to room turning out lights,

searching for loose change? How many days

had he ended by reheating lunch and praying?

I consider the long fields that blaze

in early March across the lower hills

of the great Sierras. I cannot answer.

I remember a warm bakery in winter north

of the village of Lorca where I bought bread,

the women smiling at me and giving me

the first place in line. Bread so stale

it shattered into shards as sharp as glass

when we tried to break it. My kids,

my wife, and I howled with glee.

The father had returned, his face full

of trust, bearing the gifts of earth.

It was afternoon, cold, and we had hours to go,

we had sour red wine and empty stomachs.

*

To enter the fire

is to be burned, said Leo Maryk, slumped

on the loading dock behind Kelsey-Hayes.

He’d read it somewhere, maybe the Epistles

of Paul or one of the early Fathers,

Augustine or Ambrose. On a night like this

they all ran together in his head.

“Some kind of priest I’ll make,” he laughed.

Even in the cold I could see the sweat

running down the long, jagged nose, the steam

rising from his enormous chest as from

an oven as he clenched and unclenched

his gloved hands. “A man the size

of me terrified of every little woman,

afraid to live the life my father lived,

I even changed my name.” Marikowski asking me

what was love if he couldn’t feel it

with his body? what was it? Asking me,

a kid more ignorant than he. Above us a low sky,

the slag heaps burning slowly toward a day

that never came, the others—men and women—

passing in and out of the same fires

they never saw into the world.

*

Once I believed I lived these closed

rows of tenements, the shotgunned houses

bunched uselessly against the coming

of another day. Now the stars settle

down, easing themselves into the river.

Shivering with delight, they almost

go out, but a high wind fans the little

separate points of flame. An ore boat

passes upriver. Riding soundlessly

the other way, another parts the waters

toward seven oceans and an older world.

*

The slow windward motion of the stars.

Late rain falling for hours

between the squat, closed houses.

Then silence, the town asleep, the light

not yet arrived where a single shade is torn

or a door leans ajar. A wagon pulled

down the bricked alley, and there is milk,

bread in cold packages, white, untouched.

Imagine the darkness drawn away,

the new day falling equitably

in the valleys of the living. Imagine

all the long morning fathers rising

with their wives, children making way

for children at sink and table on a day

without work or school until dusk

shatters the golden windows.

Imagine it.

*

The first time we entered

the city, it was late afternoon, Friday,

behind miles of trucks and old cars spewing

everywhere. Past closed warehouses

of gray cotton cloth, factories, low-built

laboratories grinding out antibiotics

and corn plasters. Each time the traffic

stalled we sat in stunned silence. This

would be home. Before long we

found a room and entered the darkness

together, holding each other

as long as we could in the hope

we would be home.

Morning. On the streets

a tiny man leans back planting

his heels as six greyhounds tug him

toward the single tree. Our old friends

the sparrows busy in the gutters turning

yesterday’s papers for a hint of the truth.

A blue sky enters from nowhere. A truck

delivers oranges and red sacks of milk.

Air so clear I can see all the way down

the Ramblas to where the sea goes out

on its one voyage, all the way up

to the Holy Mountain from which the devil

said, “Behold, it shall be yours, all

the kingdoms below,” and we made our choice.

*

Rain falling into the dry canals

east of here. Old couches, magazines,

dinettes—their legs skyward—, car seats

unstick slowly from the gray mud and drift

spinning toward the little dams and weirs.

A skirt, stained with wine or blood, fills

with water and swirls to the surface,

a carton of empty beer cans like trophies.

A black setter comes toward me, springing

easily along the bank, his long head

hung low, his coat soaked and heavy,

and passes without a sign.

Another day.

The sun still up past six, the dark clouds

gone into the foothills or farther,

the clear sky darkening. The water

moves swiftly past islands of calm

and darkness. I glimpse a root, bare

and silvery, groping upward through air,

an open hand of black branches breaks

the surface for a moment and then

turns under and closes up. Somewhere

a light comes on in a living room,

someone I don’t know pauses at

the window before the last light goes

and speaks to me.

One great room, the moon

sliding through the trailing wisps

of clouds or dust clouds. The child

gone under in clear water years ago,

the sad yelps of brothers and sisters

that went on and on until morning

quiet at last. The earth’s own sighs,

the day’s last breath going out,

my own silent cry of denial. They’re

all asleep, all the windows from here

to the end of the world are open,

I can hear the even breathing

of all that is wordless and final.

IV

SOLOING

My mother tells me she dreamed

of John Coltrane, a young Trane

playing his music with such joy

and contained energy and rage

she could not hold back her tears.

And sitting awake now, her hands

crossed in her lap, the tears start

in her blind eyes. The TV set

behind her is gray, expressionless.

It is late, the neighbors quiet,

even the city—Los Angeles—quiet.

I have driven for hours down 99,

over the Grapevine into heaven

to be here. I place my left hand

on her shoulder, and she smiles.

What a world, a mother and son

finding solace in California

just where we were told it would

be, among the palm trees and all-night

super markets pushing orange

back-lighted oranges at 2 A.M.

“He was alone,” she says, and does

not say, just as I am, “soloing.”

What a world, a great man half

her age comes to my mother

in sleep to give her the gift

of song, which—shaking the tears

away—she passes on to me, for now

I can hear the music of the world

in the silence and that word:

soloing. What a world—when I

arrived the great bowl of mountains

was hidden in a cloud of exhaust,

the sea spread out like a carpet

of oil, the roses I had brought

from Fresno browned on the seat

beside me, and I could have

turned back and lost the music.

SCOUTING

I’m the man who gets off the bus

at the bare junction of nothing

with nothing, and then heads back

to where we’ve been as though

the future were stashed somewhere

in that tangle of events we call

“Where I come from.” Where I

came from the fences ran right

down to the road, and the lone woman

leaning back on her front porch as she

quietly smoked asked me what did

I want. Confused as always, I

answered, “Water,” and she came to me

with a frosted bottle and a cup,

shook my hand, and said, “Good luck.”

That was forty years ago, you say,

when anything was possible. No,

it was yesterday, the gray icebox

sat on the front porch, the crop

was tobacco and not yet in, you

could hear it sighing out back.

The rocker gradually slowed as

she came toward me but never

stopped and the two of us went on

living in time. One of her eyes

had a pale cast and looked nowhere

or into the future where without

regrets she would give up the power

to grant life, and I would darken

like wood left in the rain and then

fade into only a hint of the grain.

I went higher up the mountain

until my breath came in gasps,

my sight darkened, and I slept

to the side of the road to waken

chilled in the sudden July cold,

alone and well. What is it like

to come to, nowhere, in darkness,

not knowing who you are, not

caring if the wind calms, the stars

stall in their sudden orbits,

the cities below go on without

you, screaming and singing?

I don’t have the answer. I’m

scouting, getting the feel

of the land, the way the fields

step down the mountainsides

hugging their battered, sagging

wire fences to themselves as though

both day and night they needed

to know their limits. Almost still,

the silent dogs wound into sleep,

the gray cabins breathing steadily

in moonlight, tomorrow wakening

slowly in the clumps of mountain oak

and pine where streams once ran

down the little white rock gullies.

You can feel the whole country

wanting to waken into a child’s dream,

you can feel the moment reaching

back to contain your life and forward

to whatever the dawn brings you to.

In the dark you can love this place.

COMING OF AGE IN MICHIGAN

New Year’s Eve, 1947, the old one’s ending

or the new beginning on a familiar note.

His name is McDonald, his father owns a dairy

down the block from Brass Craft where I polish

flexible plumbing tubes by the hour. “Sol and Abie,”

he says, “Fe’re not open yet for bizniz,” then holds

his nose against that awful smell, the “Abie” smell

no one asked for. Noel Baker begins to cry.

How did the night end? I can’t remember it ending.

I can remember counting the house, an even dozen

of them and two of us. My brother threw his drink

against the wall, and no one moved on him, no one

said a thing. McDonald was dragged off laughing

to a bedroom in his fancy suite we’d been invited

into by some genuine innocent who didn’t know

a Jew from Commodore Vanderbilt without his yacht.

I remember my joy at seeing Noel Baker for the first time

since the 8th grade, a skinny whiz at math and English

in penny loafers and monogrammed sweaters. (I saw her

only once after that in a liquor store in early June

years later, she was talking too much and too loudly,

but he didn’t mind, he’d left the motor running—

a white LaSalle convertible they floated off in

while we waited in line.) I forget all the rest.

*

Have I taken something away from you? Noel Baker

did not become a famous woman: it was too late

to enter the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, too early

for her to become the governor of Michigan,

which hardly makes you famous. My brother and I

did not throw McDonald from a 7th story window

of the Book Cadillac and into The Detroit Free Press,

we did not even have the good taste to have our teeth

knocked loose, to come home with our best white shirts

blood smeared, our ties torn to shreds, cigarettes

dangling from swollen lips. Don’t blame us.

The Book Cadillac is still going, though it smells

like a steam bath, and the rooms are tiny and gray.

(Down the boulevard the Statler, boarded over and serene,

did not compromise, the Fox Theatre around the corner—

a rip-off of the great mosque of Cordoba—became

a car park, and even the bus station got up one morning

and moved to the suburbs.) No one that night turned

into literature, nothing that we did or didn’t

entered the mythology of boys growing into men

or girls fighting to be people. Everyone went home

because that was how the world was before God

tuned to prime-time TV and kids still rose early

to catch the bus for school and everyone was innocent.

THE RIGHT CROSS

The sun rising over the mountains

found me awake, found an entire valley

of sleepers awake, dreaming of a few hours

more of sleep. Though the Great Central Valley

is home for the homeless, the fruit pickers

of creation, for runaway housewives

bored by their husbands, and bored husbands,

the rising sun does not dip back behind

the Sierras until we’re ready. The Valley sun

just comes on. We rise, drop our faces

in cold water, and face the prospects

of a day like the last one from which we

have not recovered. All this month I’ve

gone in search of the right cross, the punch

which had I mastered it forty years ago

might have saved me from the worst. The heavy bag

still hangs from the rafters of the garage,

turning in no wind, where my youngest son

left it when he went off ten years ago

abandoning his childish pursuits to me.

After tea, dry toast, and some toe-touching,

I’m ready to work. I pull on the salty

bag gloves, bow my head, dip one shoulder

into the great sullen weight, and begin

with a series of quick jabs. I’m up

on my toes, moving clockwise, grunting

as the blows crumple, the air going out

and coming back in little hot benedictions.

I’m remembering Nate Coleman barking

all those years ago, “Straight from the shoulder,

Levine,” as though describing his own nature.

The gentlest man I ever knew, perfect

with his fists, our master and mentor,

who fought only for the love of it,

living secretly by day in suit and tie,

vending copper cookware from the back seat

of his black Plymouth. The dust rises

from the sour bag, and I feel how fragile

my left wrist has become, how meek the bones

of my shoulders as the shocks come home,

the bag barely moving. “Let it go!”

Nate would call, urging the right hand out

against the big light heavies, Marvin

with his sudden feints and blunt Becker,

his face grim and closed behind cocked fists.

Later, the gym gone silent in the half-dark,

Nate would stand beside me, left hand

on my shoulder, and take my right wrist

loosely in his right hand, and push it out

toward an imagined foe, his right knee

pressed behind my right knee until my leg

came forward. I could feel his words

—“like this”—falling softly on my cheek

and smell the milky sweetness of his breath

—“you just let it go”—, the dark lashes

of his mysterious green eyes unmoving.

The bag is going now, swinging easily

with the force of jabs and hooks. The garage

moans as though this dance at its center

threatened to bring it down. I throw a right,

another, and another before I take my rest

in the cleared space amid the detritus

of five lives: boxes of unanswered letters,

school papers, report cards, scattered parts

of lawn mowers and motorcycles gone to ground.

The sky is coming through the mismatched boards

of the roof, pure blue and distant, the day

rising from the oily cement of the floor

as again I circle the heavy bag throwing out

more punches until I can’t. If my sons

were here they’d cheer me on, and I’d

keep going into the impossible heat

and before I quit I might throw, just once,

for the first time, the perfect right cross.

They say it’s magic. When it lands

you feel the force of your whole body,

even the deeper organs, the dark fluids

that go untapped for decades, the tiny

pale microbes haunting the bone marrow,

the intricate patterns that devised

the bones of the feet, you feel them

finally coming together like so many

atoms of salt and water as they form

an ocean or a tear, for just an instant

before the hand comes back under the chin

in its ordinary defensive posture.

The boys, the grown men dreaming

of the squared circle into which the light

falls evenly as they move without effort

hour after hour, breathing easily, oiled

with their own sweat, fight for nothing

except the beauty of their own balance,

the precision of each punch.

I hated to fight. I saw each blow

in a sequence of events leading

finally to a winner and a loser.

Yet I fought as boys were told to do,

and won and lost as men must. That’s over.

Six months from my sixtieth year, doused

in my own juices, I call it quits

for the day, having earned the rituals—

the long bath, the shave, the laundered clothes,

the afternoon muse as the little clots

of stiffness break up and travel down

the channels of the blood. After dinner

and before sleep, I walk behind the garage

among grape vines and swelling tomatoes

to where the morning glories close down

in the rising darkness and the cosmos

flare their brilliant whites a last time

before the moon comes out. From under

the orange trees the click and chuckle

of quail; the tiny chicks dart out

for a last look and scurry back again

before the earth goes gray. A dove moans,

another answers from a distant yard as though

they called each other home, called each of us

back to our beds for the day’s last work.

THE SWEETNESS OF BOBBY HEFKA

What do you make of little Bobby Hefka

in the 11th grade admitting to Mr. Jaslow

that he was a racist and if Mr. Jaslow

was so tolerant how come he couldn’t

tolerate Bobby? The class was stunned.

“How do you feel about the Jews?”

asked my brother Eddie, menacingly.

“Oh, come on, Eddie,” Bobby said,

“I thought we were friends.” Mr. Jaslow

banged the desk to regain control.

“What is it about Negroes you do not like?”

he asked in his most rational voice,

which always failed to hide the fact

he was crazy as a bed bug, claiming

Capek’s RUR was far greater than Macbeth.

Bobby was silent for a long minute, thinking.

“Negroes frighten me,” he finally said,

“they frighten my mother and father who never

saw them in Finland, they scare my brother

who’s much bigger than me.” Then he added

the one name, Joe Louis, who had been

busy cutting down black and white men

no matter what their size. Mr. Jaslow

sighed with compassion. We knew that

before the class ended he’d be telling us

a great era for men and women was imminent

if only we could cross the threshold

into humanitarianism, into the ideals

of G. B. Shaw, Karel Capek, and Mr. Jaslow.

I looked across the room to where Bobby

sat in the back row next to the windows.

He was still awake, his blue eyes wide.

Beyond him the dark clouds of 1945

were clustering over Linwood, the smokestack

of the power plant gave its worst

to a low sky. Lacking the patience to wait

for combat, Johnny Mooradian had quit school

a year before, and Johnny was dead on an atoll

without a name. Bobby Hefka had told the truth

—to his own shame and pride—and the rains

came on. Nothing had changed for a roomful

of 17 year olds more scared of life than death.

The last time I saw Bobby Hefka he was driving

a milk truck for Dairy Cream, he was married,

he had a little girl, he still dreamed

of going to medical school. He listened

in sorrow to what had become of me. He handed

me an icy quart bottle of milk, a gift

we both held on to for a silent moment

while the great city roared around us, the trucks

honking and racing their engines to make him move.

His eyes were wide open. Bobby Hefka loved me.

ON THE RIVER

My brother has an old row boat

moored to a dock at the foot

of Jefferson Avenue, Detroit.

Once a week in decent weather

he rows out to get a better

look at the opposite shore

as though Canada truly were

a foreign country. It isn’t easy

what with the ore boats’ lazy

crawl toward salt water, the launches

of tourists and cops, the lunchers

spread out on barges, docks, rafts,

waiting for the oiled clouds to lift

a moment and unveil the sun,

waiting for the fumes of exhaustion

to blow off in the poor gusts

of our making—collective breaths,

passing trucks, running dogs loath

to return to their chains.

On schedule he comes at noon

or not at all—his only free time—

so he can see with a painter’s eye

the hulking shapes of warehouses define

themselves, the sad rusts and grays

take hold and shimmer a moment

in the blur of air until the stones

darken like wounds and become nothing.

He does this for our father

who parked each week exactly here

to stare at that distant shore

as though it were home, and then

passed quietly to a farther one.

He does this for me, who long ago

stopped seeing beneath the shadows

of concrete and burned brick towers

the flickering hints of life, the colors

we made of fresh earth and flowers

coming through the wet smells of houses

fallen in upon themselves. I suppose

he does this also so that somewhere

on the face of the black waters

he can turn, feathering one oar

slowly, to behold his own life

come into view brick by dark brick,

bending his back for all it’s worth,

as the whole thing goes up in smoke.

THE SEVENTH SUMMER

How could I not know God had a son?

the biggest kid asked. I considered.

No one told me. Did I ever go to church?

Yes, but they spoke a language I didn’t

actually understand. The three stared at me.

I could have answered that it was possible

God did not have a son and that this picture

over what was to be my bed was a fake—

for one thing it wasn’t a photograph,

for another it looked like an ad from Life,

but I was already sorry I’d said, “Who

is he?” referring to the figure displayed

behind glass in a plain wooden frame.

What I truly wanted to know was why God

had let anyone do such a thing to his son,

nail his hands and feet to a huge wooden cross

from which he sagged in what appeared

to be less discomfort than I would have felt.

“The Jews done it,” the biggest one said, as though

reading my mind. I felt a chill run through me,

sure that once more I was going to be blamed

for what I had not done or what I’d done

but done without meaning to do, but the boys

—the oldest was sixteen, over twice my age—left

me to myself, for it was early to bed for everyone.

I lay awhile in the silent dark of the farmhouse

wondering if it could be so, that God had

a son he had let die, and if this were so why

no one had told me so that I might understand

why life could be so puzzling for all of us.

Days passed before Lars, the fourteen year old,

told me that it was OK, this Jesus had died

so that all of us could be saved, in the end

things turned out for the best. That was Sunday,

after the boys had returned from church—

to which I did not go—, and before we walked

into town to swim in the big public place.

I remember best how sweet was the lake water

we swam in, how I could even swallow

little gulps of it and not feel ill and how large

the bodies around me were, Lars and Sven thrashing

after the girls in their dark wool suits, the girls

squealing with mock hurt when they would catch

them up in their pale arms, for though their faces

were deeply browned their bodies were ghostly.

Sven, Lars, and Thomas, three boys as big as men,

who let me climb to their secret room beside

the hay loft, where they smoked and spoke of women,

the laughter rushing out of their great throats,

the strange words I had never heard before coughed

out in sudden spasms, and such hopes uttered

as they moved about the room in a half-dance,

half-sword-fight, calling out the magic names

of the absent girls as they stroked their own bodies

at chest and crotch or rolled on the floor

in mock death agony. August in Michigan,

the world spinning around me, my mother gone

in the grief of final loss, from which one day

she would awaken in daylight, one year

before the wars in Ethiopia, Spain, and China

could give my growing up its particular name,

and yet I sat at their table that night, head bowed

in the grace I did not say, thankful for corn,

beans, and poisonous pork, and understood it all.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit and was formally educated there, at the public schools and at Wayne University (now Wayne State University). After a succession of industrial jobs he left the city for good and lived in various parts of the country before settling in Fresno, California. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at New York University. Three of his books have been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and two of them, Ashes and 7 Years from Somewhere, have received it. Ashes also received the American Book Award in 1980. In 1987 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize “for distinguished poetic achievements,” awarded by Poetry magazine and the American Council for the Arts. His New Selected Poems was published simultaneously with What Work Is, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1991. The Simple Truth (1994), received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His latest book of poems is The Mercy, and two earlier titles, They Feed They Lion and The Names of the Lost have been recently reissued in a combined volume.

BOOKS BY PHILIP LEVINE

THE MERCY 1999

THEY FEED THEY LION and

THE NAMES OF THE LOST (reissue) 1999

THE SIMPLE TRUTH 1994

WHAT WORK IS 1991

NEW SELECTED POEMS 1991

A WALK WITH TOM JEFFERSON 1988

SWEET WILL 1985

SELECTED POEMS 1984

ONE FOR THE ROSE 1981

7 YEARS FROM SOMEWHERE 1979

ASHES: POEMS NEW AND OLD 1979

THE NAMES OF THE LOST 1976

1988 1974

THEY FEED THEY LION 1972

RED DUST 1971

PILI’S WALL 1971

NOT THIS PIG 1968

ON THE EDGE 1963