Elegy
By Larry Levis
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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