|
followed closely by Albert Goldbarth....
They Feed They Lion
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
--Philip Levine
The Sequel to "The Sonnet for Planet 10"
This three-inch glazed ceramic shoe
with the coyly inquisitive glazed ceramic cat astride it
was manufactured in Dresden. The Bible
in Haifa, and the chalkware tabletop Buddha
who looks a little like the latter-day porker Elvis
in Taiwan. The chalk in the pressing
transmutational weight of the sea. The clay
in the buried sea below the topographical contrivance
we call Germany. The sea in the first configuration
of elements spun in the stars. When meteorites
hit air they typically whistle or hum,
and one observer in Rose City, Michigan, in 1921,
is reported saying, "I distinctly heard
fine singing." Swirls in the meteorite
that fell near the Rio del Valle de Allende in 1969
are mineral proof it originated
in astral dust clouds older than the solar system.
But this is getting far from a man
in a small house on North Washtenaw today,
who's organizing what the lawyer calls
his mother's "effects."* It ought to be simple,
a box for save, a box for sell, but everything
he touches is suddenly eloquent of a spacetime nexus
larger than itself. Or maybe he just doesn't want
to think of her gone. I know, because
he's me; because the dull and pitted cleaver
in the chopping bowl is heightened by death
with the pent-in charge we normally think
would sizzle the tip of a finger
touched to an unearthed relic from Sumer.
And what of the "hatful of English pennies,
several rivets, a bunch of keys, a half-crown,
and a bobby's whistle?" —these were retrieved
from the stomach of Barnum's vastly famous Jumbo
at the elephant's dissection. Yes, but that's
their easiest provenance, and it gets more complicated,
of course, the way what we see in the sky at night
is light so old its source is often dead.
That's too much "much" for me. I'm
going to sleep for an hour or so
in my mother's bed. I'm going to be like glass
that dreams it's sand again, and sand that dreams
it's once again a living vein in the planet.
--Albert Goldbarth
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
