[New-Poetry] Levine's prosody

[JforJames at aol.com]

You Can Have It 
My brother comes home from work   
and climbs the stairs to out room.   
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop   
one by one. You can have it, he says.   
The moonlight streams in the window   
and his unshaven face is whitened   
like the face of the moon. He will sleep   
long after noon and waken to find me gone.   
Thirty years will pass before I remember   
that moment when suddenly I knew each man   
has one brother who dies when he sleeps   
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,   
and that together they are only one man   
sharing a heart that always labors, hands   
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps   
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?   
All night at the ice plant he had fed   
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I   
stacked cases of orange soda for the children   
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time   
with always two more waiting. We were twenty   
for such a short time and always in   
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt   
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.   
In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded   
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes   
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,   
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,   
for there was no such year, and now   
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,   
calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds   
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.   
The city slept. The snow turned to ice.   
The ice to standing pools or rivers   
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose   
between the thousands of cracked squares,   
and that grass died. I give you back 1948.   
I give you all the years from then   
to the coming one. Give me back the moon   
with its frail light falling across a face.   
Give me back my young brother, hard   
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse   
for God and burning eyes that look upon   
all creation and say, You can have it.   
Philip Levine 
fr. _7 Years From Somewhere_,  1979.
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