Reading Philip Levine
(1928-2015)
The last person to read this book
was Molly Renee Miller of 7527 Drive,
San Antonio Texas, 78249-2518, United
States of America. I know this
because the receipt is between pages
40 and 41, and she paid $8.95 on
December 30, 2011, at 8:41 P.M.
And now here it is, at 620 12th Street,
Franklin, Pennsylvania 4:17 A.M,
and of course I’m wondering
what you thought about it, Molly,
if you read it all the way through,
if it moved you as it’s moved me
with its descriptions of the poet’s
early days reading Dostoevsky and
lying beside his brother, as I did,
in that corner room down the hall
from our parents, how my brother
and I played twenty questions until
one of us fell asleep dreaming of animals,
vegetables and minerals. If you used this receipt
as a bookmark, you might have read
the earlier poem about the two workers
who didn’t know each other well but the man
interpreted the woman’s greased-stained lifeline
and she spit on his dirty glasses and
dried them with a napkin as they talked
until the bar closed and they parted
and walked home by themselves
but changed in ways they themselves
didn’t understand. Did that poem move you
as it moved me? To consider how most
of who we are consists of what we’ll never
understand, the way the poet won’t
reveal what happened between those two,
whether they will never meet again
or they will fall in love and grow old
and the man will write the poem about
the lucky life he’s lived, as I hope
your life is, Molly Renee Miller,
fellow-reader of this one book
that passed from your hands to mine.
I wonder, as I do now, if you set the book aside
and walked out at 5 A.M in the negative
six degree 25 mile- an hour wind chill
to look at the crescent moon,
because we’ve been reading a poet
who passed this very night, because
the wide Main Street will never
be more empty, because—
how could we know it at the time?—
we now realize that when a poet
who has come to live inside us
has taken leave of this earth,
we have no other option but
to wake and face the beautiful
cold emptiness and stroll the silent
streets until the only sound is
our hearts, beating in time
with all the words he left inside us.
—
copyright 2015 Philip Terman
. Philip Levine
Reblogged this on xHibit Magazine.
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