Vox Populi
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Larry Levis: Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.
So that in jail he will have the time to read
How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode
The king’s wrist died of a common cold,
And learn that chivalry persists,
And what first felt like an insult to the flesh
Was the blank ‘o’ of love.
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.
So that no empty court will make a judge recall
Ice fishing on some overcast bay,
Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought
To be an interesting law,
The kind of thing that no one can obey,
A law that whispers “Break me.”
Let the crows roost & caw.
A good judge is an example to us all.
So that the patrolman can still whistle
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth
And even show some faint gesture of respect
While he cuffs the suspect,
Not ungently, & says things like ok,
That’s it, relax,
It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist,
Lean back just a little, against me.
—–
Copyright 2014 the estate of Larry Levis
Source: Poetry (February 2014)
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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Thank you for running this poem by one of my favorite poets.
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Thank you for running this.
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thank you
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I’ll read this again and again.
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As have I. Levis!
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So many memorable lines and its attention to rhyme and form, but underneath as always he nods the outlaws–Villon, Caravaggio . . . . Stunning.
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Yes, Marty! His “Caravaggio: Swirl and Vortex” poem in the Perfection of Solitude sequence (in The Widening Spell of the Leaves) is one of those poems that hum deep in my heart & brain!
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Yes, Levis is a natural wonder, a tornado of leaps and associations.
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That sequence is one of my favorites in all of poetry.
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Me too, Marty! Certainly a poem I’m taking with me when…you know…
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i’m so grateful to have been reintroduced to him in the VP posts, almost simultaneously with Laure-Anne’s tellings of him, as we became friends, and those associations after reading Levine’s “My Lost Poets,” a small while ago. Poetry will grow your life!
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Just so.
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Dang. I was introduced to his work through you. We were in the Central Valley at the same time. I remember as a crazy high school kid stopping in Selma on our way to the Berkeley Folk Festival and walking around the center of town so we could say we marched in Selma ( of course that would have been Alabama) Later, we lived in Corcoran before the notorious prison that housed Charlie Manson was built. I admire the poem first, then all the memories are triggered, then I go back to the poem. Thank you.
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THANK you, dear Michael.
What a poem, what a poem!!
I miss that man — but was lucky enough to be one of his friends — so I can hear him read when I read his work.
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As you know, Sean, I am constantly, constantly returning to Larry’s work — I never tire of him, and am still learning from him each time I read his poems. And this one is just another example of his talent…
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He is so good!
what a tragic loss—imagine if we’d had ten, twenty more years of that voice!
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