In the City of Light
The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,
At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket
Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once,
When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.
That night, out of respect for someone missing,
I stopped listening to it.
Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say
This isn’t the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It’s in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?
The story goes: wanting to be alone & wanting
The easy loneliness of travelers,
I said good-bye in an airport & flew west.
It happened otherwise.
And where I’d held her close to me,
My skin felt raw, & flayed.
Descending, I looked down at light lacquering fields
Of pale vines, & small towns, each
With a water tower; then the shadows of wings;
Then nothing.
My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. Most
Of my decisions have been wrong.
When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.
A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?
Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.
Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent
City.
from Winter Stars (University of Pittsburgh Press)
This is probably my favorite poem. I already have one poem-tattoo (from this fucking amazing poem), but if I could get another, it would probably be from this segment of lines:
My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. MostOf my decisions have been wrong.
When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?
I’ve put off writing something about a Larry Levis poem, because it’s like…well, what would I say? And how could I possibly say it? Larry Levis is my favorite poet. Reading his work is like reading something closer to the ephemeral than the physical, even though it’s so grounded in the physical. It’s the closest I’ve come — in my short-lived time reading poetry — to having reading enact what a feeling must feel like. The long lines of later Levis, like falling off the Cliffs of Moher. The elliptical pauses of this poem. The transitions from the deeply specific to the universal. The space. And the light, the light, the light. Reading a Larry Levis poem is like walking across an eternal parking lot toward the bar at the lot’s end, and there’s a man holding the door for you, from so far away, and it’s him, it’s Larry Levis.
What I love about this poem is thousandfold. But, even saying that, it’s hard to even talk about anything else but the beginning. Those opening lines:
The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored.
Imagine reading a poem and immediately being brought face-to-face with such an apt summation of death, and grief, and the fear of death, and the fear of grief. When he writes, of death, and of his father — “If he could do it…” — I just crumple up. And when he centers the death of someone else — his father, in particular — as an act of final generosity, an act of “map[ping] a way,” it’s just…that’s a reason why we read poems. To be met with such a way of seeing the world, and seeing death, and seeing our constellation-like grace in relation to one another.
Right after such a brilliant description of death and generosity, you get the classic, Larry Levis word: “Once,” which is a move he does all the fucking time. He hits you over the head and heart with such graceful force, and then pivots right down memory lane. You see that “Once” twice in this poem, and it’s a thing I love about Levis’ work, though I imagine — and have heard — that it’s also a thing people dislike about it. When you read Levis, you’re reading a mind in the act of relating. Relating people, relating feelings, relating settings, relating one disparate moment to the other. It’s like watching the stars light up without knowing which ones will.
Both uses of “Once” in this poem allow it to move. From grief to the quiet city, from the quiet city to birth. Who is to say what we are allowed to remember, and how? Who makes the rules of memory? Who says that this thing cannot be related to this one? Who makes the roads? The trails? Who connects the path between two paths? The beauty of the poem is that the answer to any of these questions is: the poet. So often, structure is a room we each walk into. But within the structures the world offers us, within the structures built and placed around us, we are allowed to make our own, to conceive — through memory, language, pure feeling — of new rooms inside and outside the existing ones.
This Levis poem is such an example of that. It is fragmented. It is a memory continued and discontinued and continued again. It is a patchwork of various longings. And it is punctuated in moments of pure witness and feeling, such as:
When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.
These lines, just tossed in there, almost carefree. And yet, when considered with the opening lines about grief, they weigh more. There is the father, opening the door to death, and there is the son, opening his ears to the world. The former — so often an act of fear, is an act of generosity. The latter — so often an act of joy, is an act of pure noise.
In many ways, as you read this poem, you notice that it is entirely a poem of grief, and what grief does to love and life. It is grief that makes the speaker withhold information, to say “This isn’t the whole story.” It’s grief that makes the speaker resist love, makes the speaker long for “The easy loneliness of travelers.” I love Levis for this as well. His speakers — in part, him — in his poems are always complicated in their desires, their actions. They aren’t unanimously good. I think of the poem “My Story in the Late Style of Fire,” where Levis’ speaker details his divorce, his love, his meandering sense of moving through desire, denial, lies, longing, beginning with these lines:
Whenever I listen to Billie Holiday, I am reminded
That I, too, was once banished from New York City.
Not because of drugs or because I was interesting enough
For any wan, overworked patrolman to worry about—
His expression usually a great, gauzy spiderweb of bewilderment
Over his face—I was banished from New York City by a woman.
Later in the poem, Levis writes:
I know this isn’t much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
And it’s those lines that make me pause, that make me want to hold each Levis poem close. You feel, in his work, this great, desperate longing to “explain this life to you.” What a generous feeling, a luminous one, and, yes, a lonely one. Every Levis poem contains this sense of deep, utter, final loneliness. And it is this loneliness that sets each poem on fire. Because in taking the risk of loneliness, each poem seeks light, too. It’s from this loneliness that Levis can get away with a speaker who says this:
My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. MostOf my decisions have been wrong.
When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?
We shouldn’t trust this person, right? And yet I trust him completely. I trust the poem that says “Most // Of my decisions have been wrong” more than I trust any other. Because it’s true. It has to be. And I trust even more the poem that follows such lines of almost absurd self-loathing and internal sorrow with “A body wishes to be held, & held, & what / Can you do about that?” (The first line of that quote is, craft-wise, with the repetition of “& held,” and the enjambment falling right after “& what,” one of the best lines of poetry ever). This short, brief interlude is life enacted. It begins with an attempt at advice, with failure, with self-loathing. And then it washes its face. And then it longs. And it longs without question, without hope for recourse.
Look, I know this is a scattered job of talking about this poem. I know. I know. But I don’t know how to approach it.
At the end of this poem, Levis says two things about light: it takes us to heartbreak, and it greets us somewhere on the other side of life. It is a kind of reversal of all we are told. That love is light, and that death is the absence of light. But, in reversing those truths, the poem also contains them. And that is the kind of force that a Larry Levis poem cultivates. It holds so much so close to the so much it holds. Love is a brushstroke painted on the same door as loss.
I carry this poem with me, and have for a long time, because it reminds me of what we, as souls, are capable of bearing witness to. When I read this poem, I think of the way the magic hour light in the city sometimes breaks a building into two, or melts some kind of simmered shine on the elevated train tracks. I think of what we allow ourselves to be saved by when we allow ourselves to be saved. I think of what who we have forgotten. I remember old doors. I remember how good it sometimes feels to be alone, at night, in the too-big city, when everything is illuminated because nothing is. And I remember how good it feels to be loved, and how lucky. I wonder why so many things feel undeserved. I think of all the faces I might never see again. I wake, and I hold them closer, and closer. And I know, every time I read this poem, that maybe one thing Levis is saying is: we are light, and we are what we do to us. Without that, there is only loneliness.
Levis is my favorite poet, too. I must have cried over this poem, ridiculously, at least 80 times when I first read it…it was like being grabbed by the collar, shaken, and thrown down in awe, now with the knowledge that there was someone who could, what? Say the “thing”. That layered, timeless, “once”. Someone cares about light “and what it does to us”….on and on