Larry Levis

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

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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. It grew sullen, like a toad through…

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.

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

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

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…

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.

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…

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…

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

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?

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…

Each day I go further into the woods.
They fall before me like a
Without stars, and without a curve.
It goes on the ocean, now.

There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here.
Here, for example,
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow

My father once broke a man's
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor.  The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he

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.…

"Prince Jesus, crush those bastards . . ."—François Villon,
Grand Testament It is the unremarkable that will last,
As in Brueghel's camouflage, where the wren's withheld,
While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are…

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,…

The trees went up the
And over it.
Then the dry grasses of the pasture
Only a kind of blonde