Larry Levis' "Prayer"

Thoughts on why we do this at all.

Prayer

When I look out of this upstairs window I notice my mother
Walking out—actually reeling slightly by now in her old age with
Her pure white hair beneath the twin colonnades of fading palm fronds,
A homemade sail. She tacks slowly as a boat in a light wind, from one side
Of the gravel driveway to the other, & I could almost believe
The scene is Mediterranean, for there are still two unshattered, antique
French teacups on this sill, but my mother has no rudder, no keel,
And no idea of how far out at sea she is. She is just going out
To get the mail—which is at the end of a half-mile walk through
Palms, cypresses, & orange trees. In Italy, outside the little hill towns
Such as Montone, a row of cypresses always meant a cemetery
And the resurrection of the dead. This is the San Joaquin Valley & they
Don’t mean anything here—though my father is dead, & though my wife & son live
East of two mountain ranges, & out of my hearing. She knows it’s too late for this,
And possibly she even knows she is about to vanish soon
And leave only the palms behind her. No one’s home, & still
My mother is determined to get this ounce of exercise, this walk. She is,
I think, almost as friendless at this moment as I am friendless.
From the way she lists, I even suspect that she must be part wind
Herself by now. And now I notice that the faded khaki of the palm fronds
Above her is the exact shade of my father’s shirts, & by now
I am remembering her hair against his chest on the day he had to go
Into the hospital. He had to go somewhere because he had to die
Of Parkinson’s disease—something he accomplished with difficulty
And without his usual contempt for style. Though he was always & at once humble &
Uncompromised before others. Even such as You. Though You must remember him
At least as well as I do. Think hard, Lord, because I love
The way she weaves from one side of this driveway to the other.
I love her simple determination to continue. And I keep watching her
Weave this way slowly & then that way until I think I might even be able
To save my own son from this final disorder of loss. I know
That everything I look out upon will vanish, & I know it is only
The simple juxtaposition of two colors—her white hair against
The dead, fading, & blankly swaying palm fronds. But I have
Always been astonished at any sort of permanence, & so, Thank You.
Before everything I look out upon has vanished: Thank You.


forthcoming in Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf, 2026)

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As I write this — I can’t really believe it — I am a few subscribers away from having 5,000 total subscribers for this little ongoing project of mine. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, and it’s a sentence I’m wildly grateful for, considering I began this newsletter about four and a half years ago as an antidote to the persistent loneliness of a pandemic that I had spent, before writing these little essays, persistently scrolling the internet and drinking Miller High Life.

And so, on this tiny occasion for this tiny newsletter, the kind of occasion I didn’t ever really think would happen, I wanted to use this space to write and reflect on a poem by the late Larry Levis, which I only just read in The New Yorker — a poem that resembles the kind of poem that, when I first started reading poems seriously, lit me on fucking fire. Graywolf is publishing a new collection of Levis’ poems next year — and for that, too, I am also wildly grateful.

When I first read Larry Levis’ poetry, it absolutely stunned me. Reading his work was, I think, the first time I felt what it feels like to physically feel a poem. I don’t know if you, reading this, have ever felt like this while reading anything, but when I read a Larry Levis poem, something happens to me physically. I feel a shiver along my arms, a sensation so palpable that I can only it interpret it as the sensation of being moved.

I felt this sensation the other day. I think it was Tuesday, and I was sitting in my classroom during a prep period, and I saw that this poem — “Prayer” — had just been published. I sat on the edge of my seat and read each line all the way to the end, and I felt wonderful and safe and stirred in such a moment, reading these lines, because there is something about a Larry Levis poem that is as sweeping and grand as it is particular and intimate. And as I read this poem, which is long and full of tangents, and which moves from Italy to California and back, I felt my hairs stand upon my skin, not because of some easy-to-understand kind of lightning bolt of universality, but rather because, as I was reading, I felt more and more in the soul of someone. I felt the ache of grief in the long lines and ampersands, and I remembered that part of poetry is not to make knowable the unknowable, but rather to memorialize the unknowable, to make out of the mystery of feeling and living a kind of map that says you are here; you are not alone.

I felt that deep, aching bodily sensation in moments such as this one:

This is the San Joaquin Valley & they
Don’t mean anything here—though my father is dead, & though my wife & son live
East of two mountain ranges, & out of my hearing.

Or this one:

She is,
I think, almost as friendless at this moment as I am friendless.

Or this one:

He had to go somewhere because he had to die
Of Parkinson’s disease

Or this one:

Think hard, Lord, because I love
The way she weaves from one side of this driveway to the other.
I love her simple determination to continue.

I am struck by Levis’ poetry, and I want to write about it today, because — selfishly — it reminds me of my first love of poetry. I first loved poetry as this big, connected, sprawling thing. This long-lined animal of tangents and relations and remembrances and memories and addendums and more. I loved poetry in this way because it felt messy — not as some bad thing — but rather as a better, more apt example of what it felt like to live with a brain and a heart. Something happens, while reading a Larry Levis poem, where you realize, perhaps a little bit, that he doesn’t particularly care so much about me or you, these readers. That, instead, he seems a little bit obsessed — rightly so — with the image that drives the poem (his mother, in this instance, walking a tree-lined drive) and with the memories and privacies and intimacies that such an image relates to.

And perhaps that sounds harsh, to not be cared for as a reader. And yet, for such a thing, I am — as a reader — profoundly grateful. I find myself profoundly grateful, while reading Levis’ work, that I can feel someone so intensely concerned with their own immense and particular vulnerability.

In one of my favorite poems of Levis’, “The Double,” he writes of the very poem he is writing:

This poem so like me
it could be my double.

Yeah. I feel, in these lines, the kind of mission statement of Levis’ poetry — this impossible task to create a poem that so resembles himself, and all that such a self contains — the mysteries and regrets and desires and loves and passions both private and public — that it could stand as his “double.” It’s an impossible task that reveals a beautiful loneliness. I want you to understand me, the poem seems to say. It aches in such a way.

There’s a few lines from Levis’ seminal poem, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” that do the same work:

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.

There’s a slyness to these lines, just a slight one, seeing as they come forty or fifty or even sixty lines into an even longer poem. So when Levis says “I know this isn’t much,” well, it’s still quite a lot. And yet — there’s also a sorrow. Because even though the poem itself is long, it is not — in no comprehensible way — enough to hold or describe or even imagine a life. No poem is. And I feel Levis knowing that. And wrestling with the immense task of trying to “explain this life to you” while knowing it is, in every way, impossible.

That level of honesty — oh gosh, I long for it these days.

That level of vulnerability — yes, I long for it, too.

And courage? Yes. I think it takes courage to try, with language, to convey anything about how you feel in this world that, day by day, seems to slip to darkness.

One reason that I read anything is because — though I think we feel before we are able to give language to how we feel — it is still through language that we say I know this isn’t much or Thank you or Please or I love you or Here I am. And so, even though we feel before we give language to such feeling, it is still through language that we feel. And it is still through language that we say This is who I am.

This task, too, is impossibly difficult because it is exceptionally futile. We — me and you — eventually disappear. To hold the fact of that forthcoming loss in the present moment of anything that attempts to cope with this life is to hold contradiction at the root of your being.

Levis understands this. Today’s poem ends with such understanding:

I know
That everything I look out upon will vanish, & I know it is only
The simple juxtaposition of two colors—her white hair against
The dead, fading, & blankly swaying palm fronds. But I have
Always been astonished at any sort of permanence, & so, Thank You.
Before everything I look out upon has vanished: Thank You.

God. What an ending. I have / Always been astonished at any sort of permanence. Isn’t that so heartbreaking and true? And then — to say Thank you after such a statement. Isn’t that, too, its own miracle? What Levis reminds me of is the way in which this life accumulates. His lines — long, meandering — and his images — striking, real — give weight to that accumulation. So, too, does the poem’s length. Then, when the poem reaches this ending that meditates on the very fact of loss, we feel the weight of all that is impermanent. But we feel, too, what has been made permanent by the fact of art-making. Larry Levis is gone. This poem, though? This prayer? It’s here, in front of us, right now.

In that poem, “The Double,” Levis ends with a stanza that echoes the final lines of today’s. It is, bar none, one of my favorite stanzas of poetry. I would tattoo the whole thing down my back if I could. Here it is:

A man can give up smoking 
and the movies, and live for years
hearing the wind tick over roofs
but never looking up from
his one page, or the tiny
life he keeps carving over and
over upon it. And when everyone
around him dies, he can move
a grand piano into
his house, and sit down
alone, and finally play,
certain that no one will
overhear him, though he plays
as loud as he can,
so that when the dead come
and take his hands off the keys
they are invisible, the way air
and music are not.

That image at the poem’s end — of a man, lonely and dying, playing music as loud as he can — is heartbreaking. It is also the image of anyone trying to make art in a world of loss, which is this world. There is grace in this image. It is the grace of making a conscious effort to see oneself as a part of this world, rather than separate from it. It is the grace of believing in mystery, and believing, too, in the capability of those you have once lost coming to sit down, invisible and yet present, to listen to your music. And it is the grace of knowing that whatever we make lives on in this world. That it floats out the windows of our homes and that it is carried in the wind, a page from a book becoming its own bird. Some things are permanent. We — guess what — are not. But what we make and what we feel — this good shit we craft from language, these things we do with our hearts, for each other: they last. Of this, I am astonished. And for this, I am grateful.

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One note:

The final living member of The Band, Garth Hudson, died this week. I always thought he would be a little bit eternal. The great Amanda Petrusich remembered him with care in The New Yorker. The Band has always been and will always be my favorite band, and there was something about listening and watching Garth that always felt a bit like real wizardry was possible in this world. For your sake, and for his memory, watch him here swaying in his cathedral of keys while offering the spacious backing soundscape for the best rendition of one of The Band’s best songs. Or wait for the moment when he appears with a saxophone toward the end of one of their most heartbreaking ones. We think often of the work that is done at the foreground of things, but Garth Hudson, as a musician, taught me that there is equally — if not more — important work worth doing in the background. The work of making space for something beautiful to happen. The work of creating the conditions for someone to sing about their heart breaking in two. The work of playing music that communicates a feeling when there is no language to communicate it at all.

And more:

1. The Mutual Aid LA Instagram page has a number of resources for people looking to offer help in whatever way in support of those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles. Here is one of those resources.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.