A couple of nights ago I took down the editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry that I own--three, and it is frightening for me to think that, since I was in graduate school in Syracuse, three editions have come and gone, especially since it seems I was in school just last week, though it has been twenty years. The most recent poets are, of course, the ones who have changed most. So I was looking for absences, and was struck by the fact that Larry Levis wasn't included, since he seems bound for history, a good poet and a tragic man.



There was a poem of his that was famous for a while, and where has it gone? I found it in his book, The Dollmaker's Ghost.





To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969



Except under the cool shadows of pines,

The snow is already thawing

Along this road...

Such sun, and wind.

I think my father longed to disappear

While driving through this place once,

In 1957.

Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress

While his thoughts moved like the shadow

Of a cloud over houses,

And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,

By his desire to be grass,

And simplified.

Was it brought on

By the road, or the snow, or the sky

With nothing in it?

He kept sweating and wiping his face

Until it passed,

And I never knew.

But in the long journey away from my father,

I took only his silences, his indifference

To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.

Now, I can sleep beside this road

If I have to,

Even while the stars pale and go out,

And it is day.

And if I can keep secrets for years,

The way a stone retains a warmth from the sun,

It is because men like us

Own nothing, really.

I remember, once,

In the steel mill where I worked,

Someone opened the door of the furnace

And I glanced in at the simple,

Quick and blank erasure the flames made of iron,

Of everything on earth.

It was reverence I felt then, and did not know why.

I do not know even now why my father

Lived out his one life

Farming two hundred acres of gray Malaga vines

And peach trees twisted

By winter. They lived, I think,

Because his hatred of them was entire,

And wordless.

I still think of him staring into this road

Twenty years ago,

While his hands gripped the wheel harder,

And his wish to be no one made his body tremble,

Like the touch

Of a woman he could not see,

Her fingers drifting up his spine in silence

Until his loneliness was perfect,

And she let him go--

Her laughter turning into these sheets of black

And glassy ice that dislodge themselves

And ride slowly out,

Onto the thawing river.