PHILIP LEVINE
“My Father With Cigarette Twelve Years Before The Nazis Could Break His Heart”
____________________

I remember the room in which he held
a kitchen match and with his thumbnail
commanded it to flame: a brown sofa,
two easy chairs, one covered with flowers,
a black piano no one ever played half
covered by a long-fringed ornamental scarf
Ray Estrada brought back from Mexico
in 1931. How new the world is, you say.
In that room someone is speaking about money,
asking why it matters, and my father exhales
the blue smoke, and says a million dollars
even in large bills would be impossible.
He’s telling me because, I see now, I’m
the one who asked, for I dream of money,
always coins and bills that run through my hands,
money I find in the corners of unknown rooms
or in metal boxes I dig up in the backyard
flower beds of houses I’ve never seen.
My father rises now and goes to the closet.
It’s as though someone were directing a play
and my father’s part called for him to stand
so that the audience, which must be you,
could see him in white shirt, dark trousers,
held up by suspenders, a sign of the times,
and conclude he is taller than his son
will ever be, and as he dips into his jacket,
you’ll know his role calls for him to exit
by the front door, leaving something
unfinished, the closet light still on,
the cigarette still burning dangerously,
a Yiddish paper folded to the right place
so that a photograph of Hindenburg
in full military regalia swims up
to you out of all the details we lived.
I remember the way the match flared
blue and yellow in the deepening light
of a cool afternoon in early September,
and the sound, part iron, part animal
part music, as the air rushed toward it
out of my mouth, and his intake of breath
through the Lucky Strike, and the smoke
hanging on after the door closed and the play
ran out of acts and actors, and the audience -
which must be you - grew tired of these lives
that finally came to nothing or no more
than the furniture and the cotton drapes
left open so the darkening sky can seem
to have the last word, with half a moon
and a showering of fake stars to say what
the stars always say about the ordinary.
Oh, you’re still here, 60 years later,
you wonder what became of us, why
someone put it in a book, and left
the book open to a page no one reads.
Everything tells you he never came back,
though he did before he didn’t, everything
suggests it was the year Hitler came
to power, the year my grandmother learned
to read English novels and fell in love
with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist
which she read to me seated on a stool
beside my bed until I fell asleep.
Everything tells you this is a preface
to something important, the Second World War,
the news that leaked back from Poland
that the villages were gone. The truth is -
if there is a truth - I remember the room,
I remember the flame, the blue smoke,
how bright and slippery were the secret coins,
how David Copperfield doubted his own name,
how sweet the stars seemed, peeping and blinking,
how close the moon, how utterly silent the piano.

PHILIP LEVINE

“The Water’s Chant”

____________________

Seven years ago I went into

the High Sierras stunned by the desire

to die. For hours I stared into a clear

mountain stream that fell down

over speckled rocks, and then I

closed my eyes and prayed that when

I opened them I would be gone

and somewhere a purple and golden

thistle would overflow with light.

I had not prayed since I was a child

and at first I felt foolish saying

the name of God, and then it became

another word. All the while

I could hear the water’s chant

below my voice. At last I opened

my eyes to the same place, my hands

cupped and I drank long from

the stream, and then turned for home

not even stopping to find the thistle

that blazed by my path.

Since then

I have gone home to the city

of my birth and found it gone,

a gray and treeless one now in its place.

The one house I loved the most

simply missing in a row of houses,

the park where I napped on summer days

fenced and locked, the great shop

where we forged, a plane of rubble,

the old hurt faces turned away.

My brother was with me, thickened

by the years, but still my brother,

and when we embraced I felt the rough

cheek and his hand upon my back tapping

as though to tell me, I know! I know!

brother, I know!

Here in California

a new day begins. Full dull clouds ride

in from the sea, and this dry valley

calls out for rain. My brother has

risen hours ago and hobbled to the shower

and gone out into the city of death

to trade his life for nothing because

this is the world. I could pray now,

but not to die, for that will come one

day or another. I could pray for

his bad leg or my son John whose luck

is rotten, or for four new teeth, but

instead I watch my eucalyptus,

the giant in my front yard, bucking

and swaying in the wind and hear its

tidal roar. In the strange new light

the leaves overflow purple and gold,

and a fiery dust showers into the day.

x

PHILIP LEVINE
“Blue”

Dawn. I was just walking
back across the tracks
toward the loading docks
when I saw a kid climb
out of a boxcar, his blue
jacket trailing like a skirt,
and make for the fence. He’d
hoisted a wet wooden flat
of fresh fish on his right
shoulder, and he tottered
back and forth like someone
with one leg shorter than
the other. I took my glasses
off and wiped them on the tails
of my dirty shirt, and all
I could see were the smudges
of the men wakening one
at a time and reaching for
both the sky and the earth.
My brother-in-law, Joseph,
the railroad cop, who talked
all day and all night of beer
and pussy, Joseph in his suit
shouting out my name, Pheeel!
Pheeel! waving a blue bandana
and pointing behind me to
where the kid cleared the fence
and the weak March sun
had topped the car barns,
to a pale watery sky, wisps
of dirty smoke, and the day.

PHILIP LEVINE – “Blue”

Dawn. I was just walking
back across the tracks
toward the loading docks
when I saw a kid climb
out of a boxcar, his blue
jacket trailing like a skirt,
and make for the fence. He’d
hoisted a wet wooden flat
of fresh fish on his right
shoulder, and he tottered
back and forth like someone
with one leg shorter than
the other. I took my glasses
off and wiped them on the tails
of my dirty shirt, and all
I could see were the smudges
of the men wakening one
at a time and reaching for
both the sky and the earth.
My brother-in-law, Joseph,
the railroad cop, who talked
all day and all night of beer
and pussy, Joseph in his suit
shouting out my name, Pheeel!
Pheeel! waving a blue bandana
and pointing behind me to
where the kid cleared the fence
and the weak March sun
had topped the car barns,
to a pale watery sky, wisps
of dirty smoke, and the day.

PHILIP LEVINE
“Animals Are Passing From Our Lives”

It’s wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I’m to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won’t meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes

that any moment I’ll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,
or that I’ll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.