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    Elegy
    Elegy
    Elegy
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Elegy

    By Larry Levis

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    About this ebook

    A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had "an all-but-completed manuscript" of poems. Levine had years earlier recognized Levis as "the most gifted and determined young poet I have ever had the good fortune to have in one of my classes"; after Levis's death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy.The poems were written in the six years following publication of his previous book, The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and continue and extend the jazz improvisations on themes that gave those poems their resonance. There are poems of sudden stops and threats from the wild: an opossum halts traffic and snaps at pedestrians in posh west Los Angeles; a migrant worker falls victim to the bites of two beautiful black widow spiders; horses starve during a Russian famine; a thief, sitting in the rigging of Columbus's ship, contemplates his work in the New World. The collection culminates in the elegies written to a world in which culture fragments; in which the beasts of burden—the horses, the migrant workers—are worked toward death; a world in which "Love's an immigrant, it shows itself in its work. / It works for almost nothing"; a world in which "you were no longer permitted to know, / Or to decide for yourself, / Whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn't."Elegy, as Levine says, was "written by one of our essential poets at the very height of his powers. His early death is a staggering loss for our poetry, but what he left is a major achievement that will enrich our lives."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateNov 15, 1997
    ISBN9780822990987
    Elegy

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      Book preview

      Elegy - Larry Levis

      I

      The Two Trees

      My name in Latin is light to carry & victorious.

      I'd read late in the library, then

      Walk out past the stacks, rows, aisles

      Of books, where the memoirs of battles slowly gave way

      To case histories of molestation & abuse.

      The black windows looked out onto the black lawn.

      Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced

      By failure. It clung to me & did not let go.

      When I ran, brother limitation raced

      Beside me like a shadow. Have you never

      Felt like this, everyone you know,

      Turning, the more they talked, into…

      Acquaintances? So many strong opinions!

      And when I tried to speak—

      Someone always interrupting. My head ached.

      And I would walk home in the blackness of winter.

      I still had two friends, but they were trees.

      One was a box elder, the other a horse chestnut.

      I used to stop on my way home & talk to each

      Of them. The three of us lived in Utah then, though

      We never learned why, me, acer negundo, & the other

      One, whose name I can never remember.

      "Everything I have done has come to nothing.

      It is not even worth mocking," I would tell them,

      And then I would look up into their limbs & see

      How they were covered in ice. "You do not even

      Have a car anymore," one of them would answer.

      All their limbs glistening above me,

      No light was as cold or clear.

      I got over it, but I was never the same,

      Hearing the snow change to rain & the wind swirl,

      And the gull's cry, that it could not fly out of.

      In time, in a few months, I could walk beneath

      Both trees without bothering to look up

      Anymore, neither at the one

      Whose leaves & trunk were being slowly colonized by

      Birds again, nor at the other, sleepier, more slender

      One, that seemed frail, but was really

      Oblivious to everything. Simply oblivious to it,

      With the pale leaves climbing one side of it,

      An obscure sheen in them,

      And the other side, for some reason, black, bare,

      The same, almost irresistible, carved indifference

      In the shape of its limbs

      As if someone's cries for help

      Had been muffled by them once, concealed there,

      Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark

      —while the joggers swerved around me & I stared—

      Still tempting me to step in, find her,

                                       And possess her completely.

      In 1967

      Some called it the Summer of Love; & although the clustered,

      Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same

      As ever, the same as they did every summer, in 1967,

      Anybody with three dollars could have a vision.

      And who wouldn't want to know what it felt like to be

      A cedar waxwing landing with a flutter of gray wings

      In a spruce tree, & then disappearing into it,

      For only three dollars? And now I know; its flight is ecstasy.

      No matter how I look at it, I also now know that

      The short life of a cedar waxwing is more pure pleasure

      Than anyone alive can still be sane, & bear.

      And remember, a cedar waxwing doesn't mean a thing,

      Qua cedar or qua waxwing, nor could it have earned

      That kind of pleasure by working to become a better

      Cedar waxwing. They're all the same.

      Show me a bad cedar waxwing, for example, & I mean

      A really morally corrupted cedar waxwing, & you'll commend

      The cage they have reserved for you, resembling heaven.

      Some people spent their lives then, having visions.

      But in my case, the morning after I dropped mescaline

      I had to spray Johnson grass in a vineyard of Thompson Seedless

      My father owned—& so, still feeling the holiness of all things

      Living, holding the spray gun in one hand & driving with the other,

      The tractor pulling the spray rig & its sputtering motor—

      Row after row, I sprayed each weed I found

      That looked enough like Johnson grass, a thing alive that's good

      For nothing at all, with a mixture of malathion & diesel fuel,

      And said to each tall weed, as I coated it with a lethal mist,

      Dominus vobiscum, &, sometimes, mea culpa, until

      It seemed boring to apologize to weeds, & insincere as well.

      For in a day or so, no more than that, the weeds would turn

      Disgusting hues of yellowish orange & wither away. I still felt

      The bird's flight in my body when I thought about it, the wing ache,

      Lifting heaven, locating itself somewhere just above my slumped

      Shoulders, & part of me taking wing. I'd feel it at odd moments

      After that on those long days I spent shoveling vines, driving trucks

      And tractors, helping swamp fruit out of one orchard

      Or another, but as the summer went on, I felt it less & less.

      As the summer went on, some were drafted, some enlisted

      In a generation that would not stop falling, a generation

      Of leaves sticking to body bags, & when they turned them

      Over, they floated back to us on television, even then,

      In the Summer of Love, in 1967,

      When riot police waited beyond the doors of perception,

      And the best thing one could do was get arrested.

      The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.

      At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum

      Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street

      Was brightly lit, the opossum would

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