#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

[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

[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 

[dk-thrive]

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

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

[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)

[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.

[holyfigtree]

[gendzl]

—Philip Levine, By Bus to Fresno

[firstfullmoon]

jane hirshfield / chen chen / philip levine

[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.

[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.

[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

[sophieeeikli]

Ghosts Are Real: Poets And Their Voices by Sophie E. Eikli

What is a ghost? Is it a figure; an apparition moored by grief and trauma, unable to move on from a battlefield or house? Or is it a feeling within us, a nonlinear emotion that arises within us upon interaction with an environment. My suggestion of a definition is this- a ghost is the concentrated substance of a person who is no longer there. A ghost is the continuation of someone or something who has ceased to exist on the physical plane.

                                                      ---------

Read my essay on poets’ voices, discussing such figures as Philip Levine and Sylvia Plath, here!