Vox Populi
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Larry Levis: Childhood Ideogram
I lay my head sideways on the desk,
My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,
My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse,
White, with a small bell tower, an oak tree.
From where I sat, on still days, I’d watch
The oak, the prisoner of that sky, or read
The desk carved with adults’ names: Marietta
Martin, Truman Finnell, Marjorie Elm;
The wood hacked or lovingly hollowed, the flies
Settling on the obsolete & built-in inkwells.
I remember, tonight, only details, how
Mrs. Avery, now gone, was standing then
In her beige dress, its quiet, gazelle print
Still dark with lines of perspiration from
The day before; how Gracie Chin had just
Shown me how to draw, with chalk, a Chinese
Ideogram. Where did she go, white thigh
With one still freckle, lost in silk?
No one would say for sure, so that I’d know,
So that all shapes, for days after, seemed
Brushstrokes in Chinese: countries on maps
That shifted, changed colors, or disappeared:
Lithuania, Prussia, Bessarabia;
The numbers four & seven; the question mark.
That year, I ate almost nothing.
I thought my parents weren’t my real parents,
I thought there’d been some terrible mistake.
At recess I would sit alone, seeing
In the print of each leaf shadow, an ideogram—
Still, indecipherable, beneath the green sound
The bell still made, even after it had faded,
When the dust-covered leaves of the oak tree
Quivered, slightly, if I looked up in time.
And my father, so distant in those days,
Where did he go, that autumn, when he chose
The chaste, faint ideogram of ash, & I had
To leave him there, white bones in a puzzle
By a plum tree, the sun rising over
The Sierras? It is not Chinese, but English—
When the past tense, when you first learn to use it
As a child, throws all the verbs in the language
Into the long, flat shade of houses you
Ride past, & into town. Your father’s driving.
On winter evenings, the lights would come on earlier.
People would be shopping for Christmas. Each hand,
With the one whorl of its fingerprints, with twenty
Delicate bones inside it, reaching up
To touch some bolt of cloth, or choose a gift,
A little different from any other hand.
You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark,
But leaves names, lovers, places showing through:
Gracie Chin, my father, Lithuania;
A beige dress where dark gazelles hold still?
Outside, it’s snowing, cold, & a New Year.
The trees & streets are turning white.
I always thought he would come back like this.
I always thought he wouldn’t dare be seen.
From Winter Stars. Copyright © 1985 by Larry Levis. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press,
Larry Levis (1946 – 1996) grew up driving a tractor, picking grapes, and pruning vines in Selma, California, a small fruit-growing town in the San Joaquin Valley. He published five award-winning books of poetry during his lifetime. Since his death from a heart attack caused by a cocaine overdose, three more volumes of his poetry, along with a book of essays, have been published to general acclaim.
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If the word “haunting” is tiresome and overused, so be it. Levis’ “Childhood Ideogram” is an utterly haunting poem, both thrilling and profoundly sad.
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I agree, Ed. ‘Haunting’ is the right word for Levis’s poems.
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I agree! Haunting. And so are most of his poems. I hope that Michael’s postings of Larry’s poems will reach many new readers — I have read e-v-e-r-y book he wrote, and those published after his death, and never tire of his work.
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I believe Levis’s poems will be read for many generations..
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So fabulous—how I love this poem and take its parts in measure of my own life and expression. It is a quiet, lovely masterpiece.
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I think so too, Sean. Thanks.
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Genious. Maestro Great art.
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Yes, genius.
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No one expresses our fraught relationship with time better than Larry in his capacity as a poet to “destroy” it.
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I agree, Marty. I have never, not once, found one of his poems banal or “meh”!! His The Perfection of Solitude Sequence is, truly, a masterpiece.
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Oh, oh, oh. How did I miss him? Born in the same year, but like so many, gone. And as I try to simplify, I fail because now I must find a book of his poems.
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Levis had a gift.
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Barbara, please, please buy his “The Selected Levis” — all is very best poems are in there. He is — I assure you — an unendingly surprising, authentic, poignant, and inspiring poet!
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Ordered!
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Ordered
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Larry Levis! He is one of my top five favorite poets. I never tire of returning to his poems, over & over. So reading this poem from Winter Stars, what a treat! What awe I have for his work. Lines like: “You know how the past tense turns a sentence dark,” or “I’d watch the oak, the prisoner of that sky,” can be like leitmotifs for me for days & days, accompanying me while I drive, walk the dog, or sweep the kitchen floor. He was also a dear friend, who I miss so often… Thank you Michael, for keeping his work alive and with us!
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Somehow he turns colloquial American English into a magic spell that lifts us out of ourselves.
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You’re right! So true. He also had a surprising, completely unexpected & straight-faced humor — and when he & Tom Lux started joking, ping-ponging puns or teasing each other, there was no end at guffawing!
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I never met him, but he was clearly a lyric genius.
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