Poems

=The Gatekeeper’s Children= BY [|PHILIP LEVINE] This is the house of the very rich. You can tell because it’s taken all The colors and left only the spaces Between colors where the absence Of rage and hunger survives. If you could Get close you could touch the embers Of red, the tiny beaks of yellow, That jab back, the sacred blue that mimics The color of heaven. Behind the house The children digging in the flower beds Have been out there since dawn waiting To be called in for hot chocolate or tea Or the remnants of meals. No one can see Them, even though children are meant To be seen, and these are good kids Who go on working in silence. They’re called the gatekeeper’s children, Though there is no gate nor—of course— Any gatekeeper, but if there were These would be his, the seven of them, Heads bowed, knifing the earth. Is that rain, Snow, or what smearing their vision? Remember, in the beginning they agreed To accept a sky that answered nothing, They agreed to lower their eyes, to accept The gifts the hard ground hoarded. Even though they were only children They agreed to draw no more breath Than fire requires and yet never to burn. =Belle Isle, 1949= BY [|PHILIP LEVINE] We stripped in the first warm spring night and ran down into the Detroit River to baptize ourselves in the brine of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, melted snow. I remember going under hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl I'd never seen before, and the cries our breath made caught at the same time on the cold, and rising through the layers of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere that was this world, the girl breaking the surface after me and swimming out on the starless waters towards the lights of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks of the old stove factory unwinking. Turning at last to see no island at all but a perfect calm dark as far as there was sight, and then a light and another riding low out ahead to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers walking alone. Back panting to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare fall on, the damp piles of clothes, and dressing side by side in silence to go back where we came from.

=Here= [|20595195-000.png] =Baby Villon= By  Philip Levine

He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed Because he’s white; in London because he’s black; In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab: Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.

He holds up seven thick little fingers To show me he’s rated seventh in the world, And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood.

He asks me to tell all I can remember Of my father, his uncle; he talks of the war In North Africa and what came after, The loss of his father, the loss of his brother,

The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood. “Here they live, here they live and not die,”

And he points down at his black head ridged With black kinks of hair. He touches my hair, Tells me I should never disparage The stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter.

Sadly his fingers wander over my face, And he says how fair I am, how smooth. We stand to end this first and last visit. Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two,

No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders, Kisses my lips, his eyes still open, My imaginary brother, my cousin, Myself made otherwise by all his pain.

=Smoke= = = By Philip Levine

Can you imagine the air filled with smoke? It was. The city was vanishing before noon or was it earlier than that? I can't say because the light came from nowhere and went nowhere.

This was years ago, before you were born, before your parents met in a bus station downtown. She'd come on Friday after work all the way from Toledo, and he'd dressed in his only suit.

Back then we called this a date, some times a blind date, though they'd written back and forth for weeks. What actually took place is now lost. It's become part of the mythology of a family,

the stories told by children around the dinner table. No, they aren't dead, they're just treated that way, as objects turned one way and then another to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke.

Go back to the beginning, you insist. Why is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work. Work was something that thrived on fire, that without fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life.

We came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash, Williams, and I, it was late March, a new war was starting up in Asia or closer to home, one that meant to kill us, but for a moment

the air held still in the gray poplars and elms undoing their branches. I understood the moon for the very first time, why it came and went, why it wasn't there that day to greet the four of us.

Before the bus came a small black bird settled on the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up as though questioning the day. "A baby crow," someone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement,

his lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly for a long time. "A grackle far from home," he said. One of the four of us mentioned //tenderness,// a word I wasn't used to, so it wasn't me.

The bus must have arrived. I'm not there today. The windows were soiled. We swayed this way and that over the railroad tracks, across Woodward Avenue, heading west, just like the sun, hidden in smoke.

=Detroit, Tomorrow= = = By Philip Levine

Newspaper says the boy killed by someone, don’t say who. I know the mother, waking, gets up as usual, washes her face in cold water, and starts the coffee pot.

She stands by the window up there on floor sixteen wondering why the street’s so calm with no cars going or coming, and then she looks at the wall clock and sees the time.

Now she’s too awake to go back to bed, she’s too awake not to remember him, her one son, or to forget exactly how long yesterday was, each moment dragged

into the next by the force of her will until she thought this simply cannot be. She sits at the scarred, white kitchen table, the two black windows staring back at her,

wondering how she’ll go back to work today. The windows don’t see anything: they’re black, eyeless, they give back only what’s given; sometimes, like now, even less than what’s given,

yet she stares into their two black faces moving her head from side to side, like this, just like I’m doing now. Try it awhile, go ahead, it’s not going to kill you.

Now say something, it doesn’t matter what you say because all the words are useless: “I’m sorry for your loss.” “This too will pass.” “He was who he was.” She won’t hear you out

because she can only hear the torn words she uses to pray to die. This afternoon you and I will see her just before four alight nimbly from the bus, her lunch box

of one sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a navel orange secured under her arm, and we’ll look away. Under your breath make her one promise and keep it forever:

in the little store-front church down the block, the one with the front windows newspapered, you won’t come on Saturday or Sunday to kneel down and pray for life eternal.

A Woman Waking
She wakens early remembering her father rising in the dark lighting the stove with a match scraped on the floor. Then measuring water for coffee, and later the smell coming through. She would hear him drying spoons, dropping them one by one in the drawer. Then he was on the stairs going for the milk. So soon he would be at her door to wake her gently, he thought, with a hand at her nape, shaking to and fro, smelling of gasoline and whispering. Then he left. Now she shakes her head, shakes him away and will not rise. There is fog at the window and thickening the high branches of the sycamores. She thinks of her own kitchen, the dishwasher yawning open, the dripping carton left on the counter. Her boys have gone off steaming like sheep. Were they here last night? Where do they live? she wonders, with whom? Are they home? in her yard the young plum tree, barely taller than she, drops its first yellow leaf. She listens and hears nothing. If she rose and walked barefoot on the wood floor no one would come to lead her back to bed or give her a glass ofwater. If she boiled an egg it would darken before her eyes. The sky tires and turns away without a word. The pillow beside hers is cold, the old odor of soap is there. Her hands are cold. What time is it?

What Work Is
by Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is.

Alone – by Philip Levine
Sunset, and the olive grove flames on the far hill. We descend into the lunging shadows of goat grass, and the air

deepens like smoke. you were behind me, but when I turned there was the wrangling of crows and the long grass rising in the wind

and the swelling tips of grain turning to water under a black sky. All around me the thousand small denials of the day

rose like insects to the flaming of an old truth, someone alone following a broken trail of stones toward the deep and starless river. = = =Call It Music= BY [|PHILIP LEVINE] Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song in my own breath. I'm alone here in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky above the St. George Hotel clear, clear for New York, that is. The radio playing "Bird Flight," Parker in his California tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering "Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos. I would guess that outside the recording studio in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas, it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes, shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once— and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me years later that he thought Bird could lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep for an hour or more, and waken as himself. The perfect sunlight angles into my little room above Willow Street. I listen to my breath come and go and try to catch its curious taste, part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes from me into the world. This is not me, this is automatic, this entering and exiting, my body's essential occupation without which I am a thing. The whole process has a name, a word I don't know, an elegant word not in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed what he said that day when he steered Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles beside him while the bright world unfurled around them: filling stations, stands of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all so actual and Western, it was a new creation coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker someone later called "glad," though that day I would have said silent, "the silent music of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing. He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights to their room, got his boots off, and went out to let him sleep as the afternoon entered the history of darkness. I'm not judging Howard, he did better than I could have now or then. Then I was 19, working on the loading docks at Railway Express, coming day by day into the damaged body of a man while I sang into the filthy air the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone, eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced. "The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro," they later wrote, all that rising passion a footnote to others. I remember in '85 walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school where he taught after his performing days, when suddenly he took my left hand in his two hands to tell me it all worked out for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion, maybe he knew how little time was left, maybe that day he was just worn down by my questions about Parker. To him Bird was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note going out forever on the breath of genius which now I hear soaring above my own breath as this bright morning fades into afternoon. Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean, the calm and endless one I've still to cross. Source: //Poetry// (September 2000).