[New-Poetry] Levine

[Anny Ballardini]

A great poem. As probably almost all by Levine. I share your enthusiasm.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Graham 
  To: NewPoetry & Views 
  Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 6:21 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Levine


  Every Blessed Day

  First with a glass of water
  tasting of iron and then
  with more and colder water
  over his head he gasps himself
  awake. He hears the cheep
  of winter birds searching
  the snow for crumbs of garbage
  and knows exactly how much light
  and how much darkness is there
  before the dawn, gray and weak,
  slips between the buildings.
  Closing the door behind him,
  he thinks of places he
  has never seen but heard
  about, of the great desert
  his father said was like
  no sea he had ever crossed
  and how at dusk or dawn
  it held all the shades of red
  and blue in its merging shadows,
  and though his life was then
  a prison he had come to live
  for these suspended moments.
  Waiting at the corner he feels
  the cold at his back and stamps
  himself awake again. seven miles
  from the frozen, narrow river.
  Even before he looks, he knows
  the faces on the bus, some
  going to work and some coming back,
  but each sealed in its hunger
  for a different life, a lost life.
  Where he's going or who he is
  he doesn't ask himself, he
  doesn't know and doesn't know
  it matters. He gets off
  at the familiar corner, crosses
  the emptying parking lots
  toward Chevy Gear & Axle # 3.
  In a few minutes he will hold
  his time card above a clock,
  and he can drop it in
  and hear the moment crunching
  down, or he can not, for
  either way the day will last
  forever. So he lets it fall.
  If he feels the elusive calm
  his father spoke of and searched
  for all his short life, there's
  no way of telling, for now he's
  laughing among them, older men
  and kids. He's saying, "Damn,
  we've got it made." He's
  lighting up or chewing with
  the others, thousands of miles
  from their forgotten homes, each
  and every one his father's son.

  --Philip Levine.  What Work Is.  Knopf, 1991.






  ========================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu


  Home Page:
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