Making Light Of It by Philip Levine
Making Light Of It by Philip Levine I call out a secret name, the name of the angel who guards my sleep, and light grows in the east, a new light like no other, as soft as the petals of the blown rose in late summer. Yes, it is late summer in the West. Even […]
Making It Work by Philip Levine
Making It Work by Philip Levine 3-foot blue cannisters of nitro along a conveyor belt, slow fish speaking the language of silence. On the roof, I in my respirator patching the asbestos gas lines as big around as the thick waist of an oak tree. “These here are the veins of the place, stuff inside’s […]
Magpiety by Philip Levine
Magpiety by Philip Levine You pull over to the shoulder of the two-lane road and sit for a moment wondering where you were going in such a hurry. The valley is burned out, the oaks dream day and night of rain that never comes. At noon or just before noon the short shadows are gray […]
Mad Day In March by Philip Levine
Mad Day In March by Philip Levine Beaten like an old hound Whimpering by the stove, I complicate the pain That smarts with promised love. The oilstove falls, the rain, Forecast, licks at my wound; Ice forms, clips the green shoot, And strikes the wren house mute. May commoner and king, The barren bride and […]
M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School–Detroit, 1942 by Philip Levine
M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School–Detroit, 1942 by Philip Levine 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, […]
Late Moon by Philip Levine
Late Moon by Philip Levine 2 a.m. December, and still no mon rising from the river. My mother home from the beer garden stands before the open closet her hands still burning. She smooths the fur collar, the scarf, opens the gloves crumpled like letters. Nothing is lost she says to the darkness, nothing. The […]
Late Light by Philip Levine
Late Light by Philip Levine Rain filled the streets once a year, rising almost to door and window sills, battering walls and roofs until it cleaned away the mess we’d made. My father told me this, he told me it ran downtown and spilled into the river, which in turn emptied finally into the sea. […]
Last Words by Philip Levine
Last Words by Philip Levine If the shoe fell from the other foot who would hear? If the door opened onto a pure darkness and it was no dream? If your life ended the way a book ends with half a blank page and the survivors gone off to Africa or madness? If my life […]
Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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In The New Sun by Philip Levine
In The New Sun by Philip Levine Filaments of light slant like windswept rain. The orange seller hawks into the sky, a man with a hat stops below my window and shakes his tassels. Awake in Tetuan, the room filling with the first colors, and water running in a tub. * A row of sparkling […]
In A Vacant House by Philip Levine
In A Vacant House by Philip Levine Someone was calling someone; now they’ve stopped. Beyond the glass the rose vines quiver as in a light wind, but there is none: I hear nothing. The moments pass, or seem to pass, and the sun, risen above the old birch, steadies for the downward arch. It is […]
In A Light Time by Philip Levine
In A Light Time by Philip Levine The alder shudders in the April winds off the moon. No one is awake and yet sunlight streams across the hundred still beds of the public wards for children. At ten do we truly sleep in a blessed sleep guarded by angels and social workers? Do we dream […]
I Won, You Lost by Philip Levine
I Won, You Lost by Philip Levine The last of day gathers in the yellow parlor and drifts like fine dust across the face of the gilt-framed mirror I ofien prayed to. An old man’s room without him, a room I came back to again and again to steal cigarettes and loose change, to open […]
I Sing The Body Electric by Philip Levine
I Sing The Body Electric by Philip Levine People sit numbly at the counter waiting for breakfast or service. Today it’s Hartford, Connecticut more than twenty-five years after the last death of Wallace Stevens. I have come in out of the cold and wind of a Sunday morning of early March, and I seem to […]
How Much Earth by Philip Levine
How Much Earth by Philip Levine Torn into light, you woke wriggling on a woman’s palm. Halved, quartered, shredded to the wind, you were the life that thrilled along the underbelly of a stone. Stilled in the frozen pond you rinsed heaven with a sigh. How much earth is a man. A wall fies down […]
House Of Silence by Philip Levine
House Of Silence by Philip Levine The winter sun, golden and tired, settles on the irregular army of bottles. Outside the trucks jostle toward the open road, outside it’s Saturday afternoon, and young women in black pass by arm in arm. This bar is the house of silence, and we drink to silence without raising […]
Holy Day by Philip Levine
Holy Day by Philip Levine 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 […]
Holding On by Philip Levine
Holding On by Philip Levine Green fingers holding the hillside, mustard whipping in the sea winds, one blood-bright poppy breathing in and out. The odor of Spanish earth comes up to me, yellowed with my own piss. 40 miles from Málaga half the world away from home, I am home and nowhere, a man who […]
Heaven by Philip Levine
Heaven by Philip Levine If you were twenty-seven and had done time for beating our ex-wife and had no dreams you remembered in the morning, you might lie on your bed and listen to a mad canary sing and think it all right to be there every Saturday ignoring your neighbors, the streets, the signs […]
Green Thumb by Philip Levine
Green Thumb by Philip Levine Shake out my pockets! Harken to the call Of that calm voice that makes no sound at all! Take of me all you can; my average weight May make amends for this, my low estate. But do not shake, Green Thumb, as once you did My heart and liver, or […]
Gin by Philip Levine
Gin by Philip Levine 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 […]
Gangrene by Philip Levine
Gangrene by Philip Levine Vous êtes sorti sain et sauf des basses calomnies, vous avey conquis les coeurs. Zola, J’accuse One was kicked in the stomach until he vomited, then made to put back into his mouth what they had brought forth; when he tried to drown in his own stew he was recovered. “You […]
For The Country by Philip Levine
For The Country by Philip Levine THE DREAM This has nothing to do with war or the end of the world. She dreams there are gray starlings on the winter lawn and the buds of next year’s oranges alongside this year’s oranges, and the sun is still up, a watery circle of fire settling into […]
Fist by Philip Levine
Fist by Philip Levine Iron growing in the dark, it dreams all night long and will not work. A flower that hates God, a child tearing at itself, this one closes on nothing. Friday, late, Detroit Transmission. If I live forever, the first clouded light of dawn will flood me in the cold streams north […]
Father by Philip Levine
Father by Philip Levine The long lines of diesels groan toward evening carrying off the breath of the living. The face of your house is black, it is your face, black and fire bombed in the first street wars, a black tooth planted in the earth of Michigan and bearing nothing, and the earth is […]
Everything by Philip Levine
Everything by Philip Levine Lately the wind burns the last leaves and evening comes too late to be of use, lately I learned that the year has turned its face to winter and nothing I say or do can change anything. So I sleep late and waken long after the sun has risen in an […]
Coming Close by Philip Levine
Coming Close by Philip Levine 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 […]
Clouds Above The Sea by Philip Levine
Clouds Above The Sea by Philip Levine My father and mother, two tiny figures, side by side, facing the clouds that move in from the Atlantic. August, ’33. The whole weight of the rain to come, the weight of all that has fallen on their houses gathers for a last onslaught, and yet they hold, […]
Clouds by Philip Levine
Clouds by Philip Levine 1 Dawn. First light tearing at the rough tongues of the zinnias, at the leaves of the just born. Today it will rain. On the road black cars are abandoned, but the clouds ride above, their wisdom intact. They are predictions. They never matter. The jet fighters lift above the flat […]
Call It Music by Philip Levine
Call It Music by Philip Levine Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I’m alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing “Bird Flight,” Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, […]
Black Stone On Top Of Nothing by Philip Levine
Black Stone On Top Of Nothing by Philip Levine Still sober, César Vallejo comes home and finds a black ribbon around the apartment building covering the front door. He puts down his cane, removes his greasy fedora, and begins to untangle the mess. His neighbors line up behind him wondering what’s going on. A middle-aged […]
Bitterness by Philip Levine
Bitterness by Philip Levine Here in February, the fine dark branches of the almond begin to sprout tiny clusters of leaves, sticky to the touch. Not far off, about the length of my morning shadow, the grass is littered with the petals of the plum that less than a week ago blazed, a living candle […]
Berenda Slough by Philip Levine
Berenda Slough by Philip Levine Earth and water without form, change, or pause: as if the third day had not come, this calm norm of chaos denies the Word. One sees only a surface pocked with rushes, the starved clumps pressed between water and space — rootless, perennial stumps fixed in position, entombed in nothing; […]
Belle Isle, 1949 by Philip Levine
Belle Isle, 1949 by Philip Levine 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 […]
At Bessemer by Philip Levine
At Bessemer by Philip Levine 19 years old and going nowhere, I got a ride to Bessemer and walked the night road toward Birmingham passing dark groups of men cursing the end of a week like every week. Out of town I found a small grove of trees, high narrow pines, and I sat back […]
Any Night by Philip Levine
Any Night by Philip Levine Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas pine, the yellowing ash, all the trees are gone, and I was older than all of them. I am older than the moon, than the stars that fill my plate, than the unseen planets that huddle together here at the end of a year no […]
Another Song by Philip Levine
Another Song by Philip Levine Words go on travelling from voice to voice while the phones are still and the wires hum in the cold. Now and then dark winter birds settle slowly on the crossbars, where huddled they caw out their loneliness. Except for them the March world is white and barely alive. The […]
Animals Are Passing From Our Lives by Philip Levine
Animals Are Passing From Our Lives by Philip Levine 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 […]