You
Can Have It
My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes
drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the
window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will
sleep
long after noon and waken to find me
gone.
Thirty years will pass before I
remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each
man
has one brother who dies when he
sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this
life,
and that together they are only one
man
sharing a heart that always labors,
hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that
gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make
it?
All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then
I
stacked cases of orange soda for the
children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were
twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never
twenty.
In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant
purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or
died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a
furnace,
for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old
newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments,
bonds,
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to
ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright
grass rose
between the thousands of cracked
squares,
and that grass died. I give you back
1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the
moon
with its frail light falling across a
face.
Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a
curse
for God and burning eyes that look
upon
all creation and say, You can have it.
Nelle
Isle, 1949
We stripped in the first warm spring
night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen
bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish high school
girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the
layers
of darkness into the final moonless
atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the
lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or
smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.
Philip Levine is the author of 25 books of
poetry: On the Edge,
Stone Wall Press, 1961, 1963; Silent in America: Vivas for Those Who Failed,
Shaw Avenue Press, 1965; Not This
Pig, Wesleyan University Press, 1968; 5 Detroits, Unicorn Press,
1970; Thistles: A Poem Sequence, Turret Books, 1970; Red Dust, Kayak,
1971; Pili's Wall, Unicorn Press, 1971, 1980; They Feed They Lion,
Atheneum, 1972, 1999; 1933, Atheneum, 1974; New Season, Graywolf
Press, 1975; On the Edge and Over: Poems Old, Lost, and New, Cloud
Marauder, 1976; The Names of the Lost, Windhover Press, 1976; 7 Years
from Somewhere, Atheneum, 1979; Ashes: Poems New and Old, Atheneum,
1979; One for the Rose, Atheneum, 1981; Selected Poems, Atheneum,
1984; Sweet Will, Atheneum, 1985; A Walk with Tom Jefferson,
Knopf, 1988; New Selected Poems, Knopf, 1991; What Work Is,
Knopf, 1991; The Simple Truth, Knopf, 1994; Unselected Poems,
Greenhouse Review Press, 1997; The Mercy, Knopf, 1999; Breath: Poems,
Knopf, 2004; News of the World, Knopf, 2009.
His
poems have been published in various periodicals such as Poetry, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Atlantic
Monthly, Hudson Review, Paris Review,
Harper's, Washington Post, Nation, North
American Review, and many others. Among his many
awards and recognitions are the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry and the Wallace Stevens Award. He
was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006 and in 2011
was appointed poet laureate of the United States.
Philip Levine (January 10, 1928 - February 14, 2015)
Philip Levine (January 10, 1928 - February 14, 2015)
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