Poems by Larry Levis

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The Assimilation Of The Gypsies

In the background, a few shacks & overturned carts

And a gray sky holding the singular pallor of Lent.

And here the crowd of onlookers, though a few of them

Must be intimate with the victim,

Have been advised to keep their distance.

The young man walking alone in handcuffs that join

Each wrist in something that is not prayer, although

It is as urgent, wears

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Larry Levis

Elegy For Poe With The Music Of A Carnival Inside It

There is this sunny place where I imagine him.

A park on a hill whose grass wants to turn

Into dust, & would do so if it weren't

For the rain, & the fact that it is only grass

That keeps the park from flowing downhill past

Its trees & past the slender figures in the statues.

Their stone blends in with the sky when the sky

Is overcast. The stone is a kind of rain,

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Larry Levis

Winter Stars

My father once broke a man's hand

Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,

Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father

With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held

The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first

Two fingers, so it could slash

Horizontally, & with surprising grace,

Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,

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Larry Levis

Childhood Ideogram

I lay my head sideways on the desk,

My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,

My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse,

White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree.

From where I sat, on still days, I'd watch

The oak, the prisoner of that sky, or read

The desk carved with adults' names: Marietta

Martin, Truman Finnell, Marjorie Elm;

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Larry Levis

Words For The Axe

Each day I go further into the woods.

They fall before me like a road

Without stars, and without a curve.

It goes on the ocean, now.

And at night I fly so deeply into myself

I become still. I shine under the moon

Like the lost child you glimpse

Beneath the ice on the one day of the year

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Larry Levis

The Poet At Seventeen

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying

Echoes of billiards in the pool hall where

I spent it all, extravagantly, believing

My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.

Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,

And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath

When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang

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by Larry Levis

To A Wren On Calvary

"Prince Jesus, crush those bastards . . ."

—François Villon, Grand Testament

It is the unremarkable that will last,

As in Brueghel's camouflage, where the wren's withheld,

While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are they other

birds?)

Are busily unraveling eyelashes & pupils

From sunburned thieves outstretched on scaffolds,

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by Larry Levis

Larry Levis

My poem would eat nothing.

I tried giving it water

but it said no,

worrying me.

Day after day,

I held it up to the llight,

turning it over,

but it only pressed its lips

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by Larry Levis

Labyrinth As The Erasure Of Cries Heard Once Within It Or: (Mr Bones I Succeeded… ‘Later)

—for John Berryrnan

—Is dog eat dog out dere'—Big Business, Mr. Bones.

You know what I'm doing now? I'm watching the Complete

Poems of Hart Crane as they are slowly fed

Into a pulping machine in East Bayonne.

How intime, this foreman shouting in my ear.

I think each page should make a little speech

As it is shredded, but I don't hear a thing

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by Larry Levis

The Clearing Of The Land

The trees went up the hill

And over it.

Then the dry grasses of the pasture were

Only a kind of blonde light

Settling everywhere

And framing the randomly strewn

Outcropping of gray stone

That anchored them to soil.

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by Larry Levis

As It Begins With A Brush Stroke On A Snare Drum

The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that

everything was clear,

As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered

stillness, &, for a while,

I did not even notice the pigeons lifting above the sad tiles

of churches,

Or how they must have sounded like applause that is not

meant for anyone;

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by Larry Levis

Family Romance

Sister once of weeds & a dark water that held still

In ditches reflecting the odd,

Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept

Their own counsel, we

Were different, we kept our own counsel.

Outside the tool shed in the noon heat, while our father

Ground some piece of metal

That would finally fit, with grease & an hour of pushing,

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by Larry Levis