Richard Levine
Reaching to the Horizon ☊I hated you Legless Billy,
and the way your prairie family and fiancée looked at me, that flat stillness of the plains reaching to the horizon from every window and across the dining room table, when I described how you saved my life. We all hated you, Billy, sitting there in your gleaming wheelchair and spotted bib. It's only now, in midnight calls from mid-life that I hear in your voice how we are bound to that screaming red flare lighting all we will never again own. N'AwlinsHaggard hansom cab horses line Decatur Street.
Even in beads and bon vivant chapeaus, their sad muscles and muzzles know more solitude than pageantry. Their dull, pyramid ears poke from holes and pick brass and paddle boat horns out of Jackson Square and the Mississippi River. They do both their toil and rest at a stand, and walk and shit the color-fest streets. New ....Orleans is a good place to eat and listen and learn to forget yourself, or something you’ve left. A good place to party, visit or remake a life, if you’re not a horse standing in the rain, still as a man posing like a derby-hatted silver statue, silver trumpet touching silver lips and tourists watching and waiting for a man to turn back into a ....man. The Drowned RiverNorth along this river, before my birth,
Troy fell to the one-piece shirt, a wooden horse that crossed the Collar City Bridge and left working men idle up to their necks. Sons of closed factories and once proud makers now have no notion of the all day roar of men and machines making useful things of fealty and sweat, nor the open lunch boxes and cigarettes of loading docks at noon. They know broken bottles and windows. They know shop floors slopped in pigeon industry: filth and coos and nests in rusted rafters. They know fenced in mountains of garbage and padlocked parking lots pocked with absence. Coal-fired plants once collared this city in a contiguous black belch and coughing prosperity. Now, their cold shadows float on the river the way dead fish might appear to a floundering hungry man. And that river, that even now fails to be a river – confused by salt as far north as Troy and fjord-ways downstate – moves like a man put out of his occupation and at a loss for which way to turn from day to day. Algonquin, Iroquis and Lenape called it Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, river that flows both ways. Geologists say drowned river. And all along its shores, by any name, tribes have fallen as silent as whistles that once herded men to work. And where smoke once plumed from long houses and the making of dugout canoes, where spirits and sacred chants rose out of tribal Salamanca like sap in trees rising toward spring, now, there are only repetitions from the casinos’ neon rosary: Ka-ching! Ka-ching! And there are lines being drawn: to preserve the gifted land or to quarry and mine. And every day, more jobless towns bank the river, more estuaries of poverty spawn, seep inland and down from mountains crowned with gardens of Eden. South of those battle lines – which by air, earth water and breath are mine – I navigate the crowded tides of work and love in the empire state called my life, and the river that is not opens its mouth and speaks in the tongues and voices of gulls, foghorns and dreams, and fashions jeweled confusions of night-windows and moon, as we continue to fail. The river’s addled tides beckon, and the world comes to see this city afloat on the drowned Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk -- one vision of the world afloat in the tear of another.
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Quiet the WayIt is a meditation;
to stand on a corner, when it’s late and quiet, the way only a city can be quiet, when Saturday night’s vision fades and Sunday sights an empty cab to hail, where streetlight pools and baptizes anyone in its pale steeple. Listen and you can hear traffic lights change, though there’s no traffic either way, except maybe a bus, transmuted into a moving confessional, with only one passenger, telling more than the driver wants to hear and nothing he doesn’t already know. Lost and Found PoetryAfter watching the documentary about a poetry festival,
a student noticed the book on my desk, bearing the same title. “Are all the poets from the movie, in it?” she asked, picking it up. “More,” I said. “Would you like to read it? Take it.” Quick as those two words, her eyes widened. She placed one hand on top of the book, as if swearing an oath. Her smile broadened to her eyes, until I finished my thought. “Give it back to me after the holiday.” If the shades had been suddenly drawn and the lights turned off, the room could not be more absent light than her face, and I felt I was holding something broken when she handed the book back. Being Touched
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