Larry Levis

Different days,
Different hours,
Many faces,
bouqutes of flowers,
...

There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing
...

The brow of a horse in that moment when
The horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough
It seems to inhale the water, is holy.
...

My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
...

No matter how hard I listen, the wind speaks
One syllable, which has no comfort in it--
Only a rasping of air through the dead elm.
...

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

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool hall where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
...

1.

Looking into the eyes of Gerard de Nerval
You notice the giant sea crabs rising.
...

Sister once of weeds & a dark water that held still
In ditches reflecting the odd,
Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept
...

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
...

Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,
...

Someday, when you are twenty-four and walking through
The street of a foreign city...
Let me go with you a little way,
...

The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that
everything was clear,
As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered
...

There is this sunny place where I imagine him.
A park on a hill whose grass wants to turn
Into dust, & would do so if it weren't
...

Some called it the Summer of Love, & although the clustered,
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same
...

I lay my head sideways on the desk,
My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,
My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse,
...

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

All night I dreamed of my home,
of the roads that are so long
...

Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
...

Applying to Heavy Equipment School
I marched farther into the Great Plains
And refused to come out.
...