He sang like a gun. He knew salt and how to coax it from a bundle of rags with a long wooden pole. When he laid down he was so still children bit him. César Vallejo’s arm is dead and so are both of the eyes that starved in the Luxembourg Gardens, wondering at the […]
Poetry 63
The PBQ New York Reading Series
Everybody has the story of their first New York apartment. Mine involves a sublet in SoHo, in the same building where Scorsese’s After Hours was filmed, followed by a dubiously unleased two-bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my rent checks would go uncashed for months, years at a time. Both pads were humble abodes, places where […]
Philip Levine: Algeciras to Ceuta, 1969
We crossed in rough seas. I stayed on deck with Teddy, my youngest who had paled in the first minutes. All pluck, he clenched his teeth and stared straight ahead as the waves broke over the bow and showered us. Suddenly the second pillar loomed up out of the mist and I felt his hand […]
Philip Levine ’37
Behind the Plymouth assembly plant on East Warren, a clump of tattered pin oaks and frail maples. Sunday morning, late March, the worshippers in dark groups of two and three walked the long block from the bus stop. Low clouds dispersed, a watery sun rose slowly toward 9 A.M. shedding its light into standing pools […]
Philip Levine: The Edge of History
In the basement of the two-story house on Monterey at age eight I am plotting the next move against Franco. I sit under an overhead light, the map before me, studying the road ahead while my militia gathers outside the ancient shipyards of Atarazanes to march up the Ramblas and parade across the Plaza Catalunya […]
Philip Levine: Why We Sing When We Work
Renamed Efraim after the Lord of Light, he was given for his thirteenth birthday a small roan and pranced in the roadway raising dust in the eyes of young mothers whose curses, tame and traditional, did no one harm . His brother Ismail walked at his side. A man of some years, but merely a […]