Larry Levis

1
Looking into the eyes of Gerard de
You notice the giant sea crabs rising
Which is what

Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard Compose the dark, compose The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear One by one, above the schoolyard
If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:
A bird wo...

My youth
I hear it mostly in the long, volleying Echoes of billiards in the pool hall where I spent it all, extravagantly, believing My delicate touch on a cue would last for years
Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,
And the ...

Toad, hog, assassin, mirror
Some of its favorite words, which are breath
Or handwriting: the long tail of the ‘y’ disappearing into a barn like a rodent’s, and suddenly it is winter after all
After all what

Applying to Heavy Equipment School I marched farther into the Great Plains And refused to come out
I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest
Around me in the fields, the hogs grunted And lay on their sides
You came with a little wat...

—for John Berryrnan—Is dog eat dog out dere'—Big Business,
Mr
Bones
You know what I'm doing now

There is this sunny place where I imagine him
A park on a hill whose grass wants to
Into dust, & would do so if it
For the rain, & the fact that it is only

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum Trying to cross the street
It was late, the street Was brightly lit, the opossum would take A few steps forward, then back away from the breath Of moving traffic
People coming out of the ba...

The cop holds me up like a fish;he feels the huge bonessurrounding my eyes,and he runs a thumb under them,lifting my eyelidsas if they wereenvelopes filled with the night
Now he turnsmy head back and forth, gently,until I'm so tame and stillI...

In the background, a few shacks & overturned carts And a gray sky holding the singular pallor of Lent
And here the crowd of onlookers, though a few of them Must be intimate with the victim,
Have been advised to keep their distance

Some called it the Summer of Love, & although the clustered,
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the
As ever, the same as they did every summer, in 1967,
Anybody with three dollars could have a vision

Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,
I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto
Right in front of you so you can wa...

All
The trees held up their silent
As if they mattered
But on one main street of bars and lights,

One was a bay cowhorse from Piedra & the other was a washed out
And both stood at the rail of the corral & both went on
In each effortless tail swish, the flies rising, then congregating
Around their eyes & muzzles &...

My poem would eat nothing
I tried giving it water but it said no,  worrying me
Day after day,
I held it up to the llight,  turning it over, but it only pressed its lips more tightly together

—The Carpathian Frontier,
October, 1968          —for my
Once, in a foreign country,
I was suddenly ill