Larry Levis

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 Borghese,
Caravaggio, painter of boy whores, street punk, exile & murderer,
Left behind his own face in the decapitated, swollen, leaden-eyed head of Goliath,
And left the eyelids slightly open, & left on the face of ...

Sister once of weeds & a dark water that held still In ditches reflecting the odd,
Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept Their own counsel, we Were different, we kept our own counsel
Outside the tool shed in the noon heat, while ...

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

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

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 &...

All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures
...