P O E T S     ON THE LINE
a continuing anthology

Founded by Andrew Gettler & Linda Lerner

NO. 9 & 10         T H E  M I L L E N N I U M  I S S U E

Edited by Linda Lerner


PHILLIP LEVINE

After Leviticus
The seventeen metal huts across the way
from the great factory house seventeen
separate families. Because the slag heaps
burn all day and all night it's never dark,
so as you pick your way home at 2 A.M.
on a Saturday morning near the end
of a long winter you don't need to step
in the black mud even though you're not sober.
You're not drunk either. You're actually filled
with the same joy that comes to a great artist
who's just completed a seminal work,
though the work you've completed is "serf work"
(to use your words), a solid week's worth of it
in the chassis assembly plant number seven.
Even before you washed up and changed your shirt
Maryk invited you for a drink. You sat in the back,
Maryk and his black pal Williams in the front,
as the bottle of seven Crown passed slowly
from hand to hand, eleven slow circuits
until it was empty and Maryk opened
the driver's side door and placed the dead soldier
carefully bottom-side down on the tarmac
of the parking lot and then drove you home
or as close to home as he could get
without getting his sedan stuck in the ruts.
Neither Maryk nor Williams had made a pass,
neither told a dirty joke or talked dirty.
The two, being serious drinkers, said
almost nothing though both smoked and both sighed
frequently, perhaps from weariness,
from a sense of defeat neither understands,
or more likely because their lungs are going
from bad air and cigarettes. You're nearly home
to number seven, where a single light burns
to welcome you back with your pay envelope
tucked in your shirt pocket, the blue, unironed
denim shirt your oldest, Walter, outgrew
eleven years ago. Bernadette Strempek,
let me enter your story now as you stand
motionless in the shadowy black burning
inhaling the first warm breeze that tells you
this endless winter is ending. Don't go in
just yet; instead gaze upwards toward the stars.
Those tiny diamonds, though almost undone,
have been watching over your house and your kids
ve been away. Take another breath,
a deeper one and hold the air until you can't
Do you taste it? You shake your head. It's God's
breath, a magical gift carried
all the way from Him to you on the wind
no one can see. Seventeen separate huts
hunkered down and soberly waiting, this night
three of you in a '47 Plymouth four-door
drinking Seven Crown for eleven circuits
until the work was done, one woman alone
beneath the blind sky, standing patiently
before number seven Mud Lane taking
into her blood one gasp after another
of the holy air: the numbers say it all.


PHILLIP LEVINE

Flowering Midnight
After the rage of the anvil, the terror
of iron striking iron and iron striking back,
the streets outside Chevy Gear & Axle
overflow with silence as the snow comes down
slowly at first and then whitening the night,
filling the few horse chestnuts with blooms
as full as peonies.

         The bus doesn't come
the street lights stutter, and in the shadows
two of us stand smoking in silence, glad to be
held by silence. Two men, still young but far
from childhood when we slept through nights like these
to waken to a new world, the lost white world
we thought was ours for good.

         I grew moss roses
in the little rock garden behind the house
of my growing up. Was that yesterday,
when I was twelve and my hands reeked of dirt
blackened with compost, when the spring battered
the mock orange into blossom, and I dreamed
of flowers like these?

         I knew then the world
would be flowers like these: the blood-red roses
bursting along the fence even into autumn,
the single dahlia brought down by its own weight,
lilies of the valley, cosmos, and beyond
the wild fields of milkweed, flags, the trash dumps
alive with gray rats.

         My friend Marion,
the ex-junkie and novice drop-forge worker,
off by himself humming "Body and Soul,"
stares wide-eyed straight up letting the flakes
fill his mouth. He played with Hawkins before
his troubles and now has four ten-inch Bluebirds
left to prove it. Now even these trees hunger
for the music, three black trees filling with winter.


Top  |  Table of Contents  |  Home