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 […]
An Abandoned Factory, Detroit by Philip Levine
An Abandoned Factory, Detroit by Philip Levine The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands, An iron authority against the snow, And this grey monument to common sense Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands, Of protest, men in league, and of the slow Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence. Beyond, through broken […]
Among Children by Philip Levine
Among Children by Philip Levine I walk among the rows of bowed heads– the children are sleeping through fourth grade so as to be ready for what is ahead, the monumental boredom of junior high and the rush forward tearing their wings loose and turning their eyes forever inward. These are the children of Flint, […]
A Woman Waking by Philip Levine
A Woman Waking by Philip Levine She wakens early remembering her father rising in the dark lighting the stove with a match scraped on the floor. Then measuring water for coffee, and later the smell coming through. She would hear him drying spoons, dropping them one by one in the drawer. Then he was on […]
A Theory Of Prosody by Philip Levine
A Theory Of Prosody by Philip Levine When Nellie, my old pussy cat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote, and when the line got too long she’d reach one sudden black foreleg down and paw at the moving hand, the offensive one. The first time she drew blood […]
A Sleepless Night by Philip Levine
A Sleepless Night by Philip Levine April, and the last of the plum blossoms scatters on the black grass before dawn. The sycamore, the lime, the struck pine inhale the first pale hints of sky. An iron day, I think, yet it will come dazzling, the light rise from the belly of leaves and pour […]
To The Honble Commodore Hood on His Pardoning a Deserter by Phillis Wheatley
It was thy noble soul and high desert That caus’d these breathings of my grateful heart You sav’d a soul from Pluto’s dreary shore You sav’d his body and he asks no more This generous act Immortal wreaths shall bring To thee for meritorious was the Spring From whence from whence, [sic] this candid ardor […]
To Mrs. Leonard on The Death of Her Husband by Phillis Wheatley
GRIM Monarch! see depriv’d of vital breath, A young Physician in the dust of death! Dost thou go on incessant to destroy: The grief to double, and impair the joy? Enough thou never yet wast known to say, Tho’ millions die thy mandate to obey. Nor youth, nor science nor the charms of love, Nor […]
Phillis Wheatley – Phillis Wheatley
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On The Death of Mr. Snider Murder’d By Richardson by Phillis Wheatley
In heavens eternal court it was decreed How the first martyr for the cause should bleed To clear the country of the hated brood He whet his courage for the common good Long hid before, a vile infernal here Prevents Achilles in his mid career Where’er this fury darts his Pois’nous breath All are endanger’d […]
On Messrs Hussey and Coffin by Phillis Wheatley
Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind, As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind? Was it not Boreas knit his angry Brow Against you? or did Consideration bow? To lend you Aid, did not his Winds combine? To stop your passage with a churlish Line, Did haughty Eolus with Contempt look down With […]
On Friendship by Phillis Wheatley
Let amicitia in her ample reign Extend her notes to a Celestial strain Benevolent far more divinely Bright Amor like me doth triumph at the sight When my thoughts in gratitude imploy Mental Imaginations give me Joy Now let my thoughts in Contemplation steer The Footsteps of the Superlative fair Boston July 15 1769 End […]
To The Honble Commodore Hood on His Pardoning a Deserter by Phillis Wheatley
It was thy noble soul and high desert That caus’d these breathings of my grateful heart You sav’d a soul from Pluto’s dreary shore You sav’d his body and he asks no more This generous act Immortal wreaths shall bring To thee for meritorious was the Spring From whence from whence, [sic] this candid ardor […]
His Excellency General Washington by Phillis Wheatley
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light, Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write. While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms, She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms. See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan, And nations gaze at scenes before unknown! See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light Involved in sorrows and the veil […]
On Friendship by Phillis Wheatley
Let amicitia in her ample reign Extend her notes to a Celestial strain Benevolent far more divinely Bright Amor like me doth triumph at the sight When my thoughts in gratitude imploy Mental Imaginations give me Joy Now let my thoughts in Contemplation steer The Footsteps of the Superlative fair Boston July 15 1769 End […]