#Philip Levine

[firstfullmoon]

Philip Levine, “The Mercy”

[lunchboxpoems]

[merricatvance]

Philip Levine, 'Godspell' // Neon Genesis Evangelion, 'The Beginning and the End, or "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"'

[undinesea]

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

Philip Levine, from 7 Years from Somewhere: Poems

[dk-thrive]

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the road-side stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said, "Even if you don't I'll say you did." Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames, they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 before I went away, before he began to kill himself, and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious, it stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong, it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt, in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

— Philip Levine, "The Simple Truth" in "The Simple Truth: Poems" (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; September 3, 1996)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Ingo Swann  “Rainbow”

* * * *

There were comfortable books, and another kind of comfort in recognizing my own condition or its equivalents and analogies in others, in not being alone in my loneliness and angst. Sometimes one piece would crash into me: I still have the poem “Never Before” by Philip Levine, from the New Yorker in the fall of 1980 (I clipped Levine’s columns and taped them together into a narrow strip, now yellowed, exactly as long as my arm, with a deeper amber where the tape joins the sections together. It looks like a bandage but reads like a wound). It is a poem of devastation: 

Never before have I heard my own voice cry out in a language not mine that the earth was wrong that night came first and then nothing that birds flew only to their deaths that ice was the meaning of change that I was never a child nor were you nor were my lost sons nor the sons they won’t have

It spoke to me when I was very nearly a child. Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.

Recollections of My Nonexistence :: by Rebecca Solnit

[contremineur]

We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I’d never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Avenue and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the grey coarse beach we didn’t dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from.

Philip Levine, Belle Isle 1949

from here

[whatlightdoes]

Out of whatever we have been We will make something for the dark.

Philip Levine, closing lines to “For Fran,” New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)

[typewriter-worries]

A lifetime passes in the blink of an eye. You look back and think, that was heaven, so of course it had to end.

Growing Season, Philip Levine 

[insilverrolled]

You Can Have It

Philip Levine [x]

My brother comes home from work and climbs the stairs to our room. I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window and his unshaven face is whitened like the face of the moon. He will sleep long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labors, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed the chute its silvery blocks, and then I stacked cases of orange soda for the children of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty for such a short time and always in the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds, wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice. The ice to standing pools or rivers racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948. I give you all the years from then to the coming one. Give me back the moon with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.

[firstfullmoon]

jane hirshfield / chen chen / philip levine

[holyfigtree]

[6peaches]

Philip Levine - The Second Going

Again the day begins, only no one wants its sanity or its blinding clarity. Daylight is not what we came all this way for. A pinch of salt, a drop of schnapps in our cup of tears, the ticket to the life to come, a short life of long nights & absent dawns & a little mercy in the tea.

[undinesea]

Wherever you are now there is earth somewhere beneath you waiting to take the little you leave. This morning I rose before dawn, dressed in the cold, washed my face, ran a comb through my hair and felt my skull underneath, unrelenting, soon the home of nothing. The wind that swirled the sand that day years ago had a name that will outlast mine by a thousand years, though made of air, which is what I too shall become, hopefully, air that says quietly in your ear, “I’m dust and memory, your two neighbors on this cold star.”

Philip Levine, from Dust and Memory

[dk-thrive]

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

— Philip Levine, from "Gospel" in Breath: Poems (Knopf; January 17, 2006) (via "Thoughts")

[manwalksintobar]

The Unknowable // Philip Levine

Practicing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge hour after hour, "woodshedding" the musicians called it, but his woodshed was the world. The enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins that could fill a club to overflowing blown into tatters by the sea winds teaching him humility, which he carries with him at all times, not as an amulet against the powers of animals and men that mean harm or the lure of the marketplace. No, a quality of the gaze downward on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan. Hold his hand and you'll see it, hold his eyes in yours and you'll hear the wind singing through the cables of the bridge that was home, singing through his breath--no rarer than yours, though his became the music of the world thirty years ago. Today I ask myself how he knew the time had come to inhabit the voice of the air and how later he decided the time had come for silence, for the world to speak any way it could? He wouldn't answer because he'd find the question pompous. He plays for money. The years pass, and like the rest of us he ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great shoulders narrow. He is merely a man-- after all--a man who stared for years into the breathy, unknowable voice of silence and captured the music.