Larry Levis' "The Double"

Thoughts on, well, Larry Levis.

The Double

Out here, I can say anything.
I can say, for example, that a girl
disappearing tonight
will sleep or stare out
fixedly as the train moves her
into its adulthood of dust
and sidings.

I remember watching wasps
on hot evenings
fly heavily over chandeliers
in hotel lobbies.
They’ve torn them down, too.
And the elderly drunks
who seemed not to mind anything,
who seemed to look for change
in their pockets, as they gazed
at the girl in the Pepsi ad,
and the girl who posed for the ad,
must all be dead now.

I can already tell that this
is no poem to show you,
this love poem. It’s so
flat spoken and ignorable,
like the man chain smoking
who discovers he’s
no longer waiting for anyone,
and goes to the movies
alone each Saturday, and grins,
and likes them.
This poem so like the hour
when the street lights turn
amber and blink, and the calm
professor burns another book,
and the divorcee waters her one
chronically dying plant.
This poem so like me
it could be my double.

I have stood for a long time
in its shadow, the way I stood
in the shadow of a dead roommate
I had to cut down from the ceiling
on Easter break, when
I was young.

That night I put my car
in neutral, and cut the engine
and lights to glide downhill
and hear the wind rush over
the dead metal.
I had to know what it felt
like, and under the moon,
gaining speed, I wanted to slip
out of my body and be
done with it.

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.


from Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2026)

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For the past month, I have been teaching a class for the Adirondack Center for Writers on the poetry of Larry Levis, a class inspired and prompted by the release of Swirl & Vortex, edited by David St. John and L.A. Johnson—a much awaited edition of Levis’ collected poems, including a number of unpublished ones, such as “Prayer,” which I wrote about last year.

I taught this class for somewhat selfish reasons; there is perhaps no poet I adore more than Levis (in fact, I named one of the monks in my recent novel, Pilgrims, after him), and I wanted both to spend some time with his work and to also solicit some help from fellow writers and readers. I wanted to know people’s assessment of what I think of as the ineffable quality of Levis; I wanted help naming the impossible-to-name, which is to say, that aspect of Levis’ work that makes it so uniquely Levis, a style that evolves even as he returns to many of the same obsessions.

For their final writing assignment, I asked my students to do the following:

For your final writing assignment, I'd like you to do the probably impossible. I'd like you to try to pinpoint something at work in Levis' poetry, whether in the craft of his writing, or his poetic vision, or his worldview, or his emotional sensibility, or something else and more. Pick a poem to do this about, one that exemplifies the heart of what you are trying to say. It can be a poem we've discussed in class. It can be another that you have found and read and perhaps loved.

You can then do one of two things:

1) You can write a brief essay that explores that inner working of Levis' that you have tried to figure out. An essay that tries to nail down the un-nail-down-able. Your essay can meander, explore, pinpoint, explicate, whatever.

2) You can write a poem that is modeled after that very thing you see at work in Levis' poetry, a poem that meanders or investigates or interrogates or confesses or something else and more. Perhaps you think that Levis' poetry is obsessed with impermanence; then you, too, can write a poem obsessed with impermanence. Perhaps you think that Levis' poetry refuses to end, refuses to believe in a story that is not linked at the arms with another story. Then you, too, can write a poem that links stories at the arms.

As always, you can do both things if you want.

For this week’s newsletter, I wanted to engage with the same prompt. And though part of me wanted to center the newsletter around a later poem of Levis’, perhaps a previously unpublished one, I kept coming back to a first-favorite of mine: "The Double,” from Levis’ 1977 book, The Afterlife.

It’s funny. Just the other week, I was reading at a series hosted by fellow Levis-lover, Robert Wood Lynn, and we were talking about which poem of Levis’ we would read aloud if given the chance. One and only one. I adore the final poem in Swirl & Vortex, Levis’ seminal poem, “God Is Always Seventeen,” with its toward-the-end-of-the-poem volta that breaks your heart (provided you read the entirety of what comes before):

I have a child who isn’t doing well in school.
It’s not his grades. It’s that he can’t wake up.

He misses his morning classes & doesn’t answer when I call & doesn’t
Return my calls.

I have, on more than one occasion, during readings of my own, read this poem aloud. There is something about Levis’ voice in it, the fire burning within the poem, this longing, I think, for someone to hear this story of his that he takes so long to arrive at, beginning with the stories of others before divulging, with great sorrow and some kind of never-to-be-resolved ache, his own, that makes reading such a poem aloud feel like holding someone’s ripped-out-of-the-chest heart in a room full of people who know, I imagine, what it’s like to have their own hearts ripped out of their own chests.

But this poem today was the first Levis poem I fell in love with. It’s this final stanza, which is the first thing of Levis’ I ever memorized, that moves me:

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.

What an image. My god. Of shame and great beauty. Of embarrassment, even. And art making. And wonder. This man, lonelier than ever, waiting to play until he is sure that no one will hear him. And yet playing as loud as he can. Playing and playing and playing, until his last breath. Making something visible. Making something despite the lonely fragility of a life.

Levis died almost two decades after this poem was published, and in those two decades, his style evolved tremendously. He moved away from this thinner, plain-spoken kind of poem, characterized by a directness that sits in the midst of so much trying-to-understand. Here is that directness:

I have stood for a long time
in its shadow, the way I stood
in the shadow of a dead roommate
I had to cut down from the ceiling
on Easter break, when
I was young.

There is a brutal honesty and specificity here that arises out of the poem almost out of nowhere, which is true of much of Levis’ work—how you are never more than a line away from death, or loss, the personal grief that comes with living, the systemic grief that comes with living in a country. It’s as if Levis knows that the phrase “out of nowhere” is actually misleading. Nothing comes out of nowhere. We are always that close to loss. Just a word or line away.

In that same book, in a different poem, “The Crimes of the Shade Trees,” Levis writes:

And it doesn't matter.
For example, if I am really
Something ordinary, a doorstep,
Or the gleaming of frost on someone's lawn
As he shaves, that would be alright.

These poems sit in the same vocal register, and though they sometimes meander and sometimes move between subjects, they do so with these moments of course correction, where the white space appears and the poem moves back toward where it began. In his later poems, Levis’ lines grew longer, as if, I wonder, he wanted to give enough space for the way that so many of his obsessions—whether impermanence, whether soul, whether music, whether exile, whether elegy, whether death—continued to return, and continued to remain unresolved. I wonder if, in those later poems, Levis was more sure of that lack of resolution, and perhaps even more comfortable with it, and was willing to allow his poems to appear as such, moving from margin to margin with less self-consciousness and more self-searching.

Perhaps that is why I am thinking of this poem today, because of the way that Levis remained the central character inside of it, this man:

never looking up from
his one page, or the tiny
life he keeps carving over and
over upon it

Though the life might have felt tiny, the page surely did not. The page was there, over and over again. And the lines. And the words to fill those lines.

All of that is true from the poem’s opening:

Out here, I can say anything

Though this line exists within the frame of the poem, I can sense Levis applying this sentiment to the act of poetry itself, as in: on the page, I can say anything. As in: right now, writing this, I can say anything. What’s interesting, though, and what I love about Levis, is that, even with that as a central guiding truth of this poem, he still writes with so much distance within this poem, offering space between the poem and himself.

This poem, he writes, so like me it could be my double.

Or, for example, in the final stanza, Levis stays in the third person, rather than the first, which he used prior. The man in that final stanza feels so much like himself, and yet Levis still distances himself from that character by keeping him in the third person.

In other words: though he says he can say anything, Levis does not always say everything.

And I think it’s that deep, vulnerable, perhaps slightly ashamed humanity that draws me to a Levis poem—how he is so willing to break himself open on the page, and yet how he sometimes does so with a style that makes it clear how much he still doubts, or hurts, or wonders, or aches.

If I am really something ordinary, he writes, that would be alright.

There is this ongoing desire at the heart of a Larry Levis poem to wrestle with both the enormity of the sensations that come with living a life and the ordinariness of that very life itself: its impermanence, its frailty, its flaws. Somehow, a Levis poem can explore diminishment at the same time as expansiveness. Somehow.

And so I think, finally, that is why I love this poem today. Because of its title—“The Double”—and how such a title hints at a kind of doubleness that exists in much of Levis’ work. By doubleness, I mean a certain duality, where a poem can operate as something on its own and something “so like me / it could be my double.” Where a person can be at once ashamed and at once feeling the world with feelings that are akin to flames. This is where the wrestling happens, where the magnitude of one’s desires and longings and sorrows and adorations do not seem to exist on the same plane as the ordinary impermanence of one’s life. And yet, in a poem by Larry Levis, such distance is given the same line, the same phrase, is given a space where so much can be so like so much else, so much so that it could be its double.

This doubleness permeates nearly all of Levis’ work. It’s there in his poem, “Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex,” as he looks at a painting and sees his lost friend within it:

I had a friend in high school who looked like Caravaggio, or like Goliath—
Especially when he woke at dawn on someone's couch. (In early summer,
In California, half the senior class would skinny-dip & drink after midnight

In the unfinished suburb bordering the town, because, in the demonstration models,
They finished the pools before the houses sold. . . . Above us, the lush stars thickened.)
Two years later, thinking he heard someone call his name, he strolled three yards

Off a path & stepped on a land mine.

It’s there in “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” when he walks himself into the poem, and gives flames the doubleness of both violence and voice:

If my house burned down tomorrow morning, & if I & my wife
And son stood looking on at the flames, & if, then
Someone stepped out of the crowd of bystanders
And said to me: “Didn’t you once know. . . ?” No. But if
One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,
And if it said to me: “You loved her, didn’t you?” I’d answer,
Hands in my pockets, “Yes.”

It’s there in “The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing,” which ends with someone being at once “nothing” and yet “all I had”:

You slept with your mouth open.

You were nothing,
You were snow falling through the ribs
Of the dead.

You were all I had.

And it’s there in “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern In It,” where Levis writes of that doubleness of oblivion, that wild paradox:

Oblivion with his blown fires, & empty towns...

Oblivion who would be nothing without us, I am thinking,

As if we're put on the earth to forget the ending, & wander.
And walk alone. And walk in the midst of great crowds,

And never come back.

I feel, in such moments, a great sense of empathy and compassion, as if Levis understands that any encounter with the world can relate to any other encounter with the world, that nothing truly exists in isolation, that every sorrow and every soul is linked to every sorrow and every soul. Maybe that is why so many of his poems are so long; they insist on the necessary length that connection requires, like a cable strung across an ocean floor. And though doubling implies a kind of distance, as that is, in one way, what metaphor requires—distance between two things—Levis’ poems use doubling as a way to level distance.¹ They close the gaps between things. Between a painting thousands of miles away from the place where a lost friend once stood. That, I think, is an exercise in compassion.

Perhaps this is one reason why, in this world of tech billionaires chasing immortality and the rest of us sifting through our individualized oceans of algorithmic media, Levis’ poetry is worth reading. It is a poetry that does not lie to us. The dead remain dead. They remain invisible. And yet, because of this duality, in which Levis recognizes that anything living has the capacity to remind us of anything lost, the dead return to the page, where anything can be said, where anything can live. The poem becomes a visible testament to the invisible world. And so much is invisible, right? Our griefs, our joys, our secrets, those major losses we know no one will understand and those minor losses we keep to ourselves. Oblivion is nothing without our lives. And so Levis writes about life before it is lost. Because, I think, he knows it will be lost.

In many ways, one beauty of a Levis poem is that it feels as if it might never end. Within one of his poems, there is possibility and permission. There is the willingness to say anything, and there is, coupled with that willingness, an attention that takes on a kind of witness and a kind of remembrance. To read such a poem is to be reminded that we are capable of depth beyond our wildest imagination, and that such depth is ordinary, is rooted in the act of seeing, simply seeing, one another.

And so I turn again to today’s opening line:

Out here, I can say anything.

Say it, then. Let the poem stand as testament to witness, and to the real honesty of witness, and to the real vulnerability of a self. Let the poem begin where it needs to begin so you can arrive wherever you need to arrive. It will end regardless. Yes, one truth of life is that it ends. And so to begin, to begin anything, is an unbelievable gift. To make, out of this finite life, a poem? Something visible? Which is to say, vulnerable? To insist on such a thing, even knowing oblivion is forever on its way? To offer something permanent, which is an act of love, in the fragile futility of our impermanence? To write and live in such a way that makes it seem as if what we feel is endless, though we know it is not? To see each other in such a way that, even when we no longer see each other, we still find each other? What would that look like? What kind of music? What kind of poem? What kind of life?

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1. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

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1. Indeed, Levis actually supplies the best reminder of this, in his poem “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967,” where he explicitly names that he is not going to offer a kind of doubling here, and is instead going to let the poem be about exactly who and what it is about. This, too, a resisting of metaphor, is in and of itself a sort of doubling, where Levis acknowledges that there could be a distance that allows for excuses or turning away, and he refuses that distance for nearness:

I'm going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
In front of you on this page so that
You won't mistake him for something else,
An idea, for example, of how oppressed
He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
Grapes, from a row of vines.