The Memory of Clay
for Terry Dietrich
© 2006 by Donald Levin
Feel its slippery cold, its gray heft
as you cup your hands around the earth’s flesh
and press, and push, and urge
the malleable matter into a sphere
sufficient for smashing down
on the dampened bat’s turning heart
and then, if you’re new to the game,
wrestling with the spinning lump
to make it sit, still, solid, obedient
in the whirling center, and only then,
in the miracle of transformation, grow,
rise from its dull turtleshell of a seed,
supported by some helpful body English,
climb into a bud, a new mushroom’s few
umbrellaed inches, only to begin again
when, like a child with a mind of its own
it starts to lean outside your shaping hands
toward a compass point you didn’t plan for —
until, smashed, recentered, the steps recapitulated,
it begins to grow again, then, your hands moving
around and on and inside its changing shape
(keeping that bottom clean, those sides slick,
that lip crisp) becomes something tall
and subtly formed, straight sides curved in,
gaping mouth constricted to a cultured O.
Later, fresh from the oven, its gray skin
gone white, its sleek give hard, grainy
and tickling to the touch, the lean
you tried so hard to wipe away is back,
fine and sly but undeniably there,
the clay remembering, in the fire of its finish,
the shape it always wanted to assume.
Et in Arcadia Ego
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position.
–W.H. Auden
Standing waist deep in the water,
my brother slaps a hand on the surface
of the startled round blue sunny mouth
of the above-ground backyard pool
to mark the seconds advancing
in the breath-holding contest.
Beside him, buoyant, his friend
does a perfect dead-man’s float
passing ninety-nine one-thousand
as the waves slosh over the sides
of the corrugated metal ring
burnishing a dark halo
in the sand beneath the pool.
“Aguirre on the mound,” announces
Ernie Harwell from the transistor
on the webbed chair beside the pool.
“Swing and a miss,” Harwell calls it
and an approving murmur issues
from the ballpark’s sparse August crowd
in the summer of my thirteenth year.
Suddenly the door to the porch
off my brother’s second floor bedroom
bursts open and our mother, stricken,
thrusts her head out. “Marilyn Monroe
died!” she cries, voice husky from smoking,
needing to notify someone
and we are all she can find right now–
we for whom death is yet a stranger.
Ears submerged but thinking from her tone
she is agitated about him,
the teenager still drifting face down
like a felled log lifts a calming hand
and sends her up an okay sign
while my brother keeps his steady count
of the cruel seconds racing past
in Detroit in 1962.
copyright Donald Levin 2012
This Day is Fulfilled: A Meditation on Luke
A sonnet chain written for the 2012 graduating class at Marygrove College, Detroit
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
–Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls us to the Things of This World”
1
On the pavement by the side of the road
a man walks–no, not walks: staggers, stumbles,
does a slack jitter step down the sidewalk
hops about to preserve his feet beneath him
(assuming there are feet somewhere inside
those laceless tatters that once were spanky brogans)
as rush-hour traffic thickens, occludes
near the corner of 8 Mile and Woodward
on an overcast weekday in May, warm,
windy, threatening rain, the sun a distant hint
behind a scrim of clouds, a promise, really, or
reminder. And as you idle at the stoplight
on your way to somewhere, late, your mind absent,
you see him halt, stand, and fix you in his gaze.
2
He halts, stands, and fixes you in his gaze
if gaze there is in eyes that squint, almost closed,
through the soupy blue haze of exhaust, seasoned
with the sweet scent of gasoline; he could be
blind for all you know, looking not at you
but in your direction, puffy-eyed, bruised,
his head a mass of greasy hair and tangled beard,
lanky frame monkish in a hooded coat
stiff with dirt and britches of a startling
cranberry hue, his shape narrow as a nail;
and don’t think I mistake this man in such an
altered mental state for Jesus, though you may,
but I wouldn’t advise it because now
he’s fastened upon you, and here it comes–
3
He’s fastened upon you and here it comes–
“Yo! Chief! Got something for me today?”
At least that’s what you think he says, words gleaned
from the sustained confusion of traffic,
the hiss of tires, the shriek of faulty brakes
behind you, as if you’ve often seen him
before, and maybe you have, and you think
about how much there is in this world,
and how little; how close we are, and how
impossibly far apart. And you think
you hear music, floating in the air, remote,
the roar of city buses, the thunder of trucks
unable to veil the strains of a tune
you can’t quite catch but you’re sure it’s there.
4
You can’t quite catch it but you’re sure it’s there–
and “Yo, chief!” he says again, and this time
you hear him plainly, this cumbersome twitchy
bird-man. And you start to believe that you do
have something for him: because all at once
you recognize that face, that snarled beard, that
insouciant query; and you intuit
the heartbreak that brought him to this corner;
the despair that keeps him reeling down the sidewalk;
whatever illness it was that stripped the flesh
so fully from his spare lurching frame. Luke,
evangelist, patron saint of healers,
artists, students, tell us how we know him,
teach us what we owe him, this austere outcast.
5
Teach us what we owe him, this austere outcast.
Teach us how we know, what we owe each other.
Move the spirit upon us, finally, that
makes us love the least and most among us.
For we must love, we know this in our hearts.
Such is, surely, the central lesson mastered
from your rigorous years of study, which
we assemble here to celebrate today,
paused not at the end of your education,
but its beginning; for now are you primed
to learn to love the world in earnest, and spread
a gospel of your own of mercy and wisdom,
hope and liberation, your truths suffused with
that music whose soft melodies you hear.
6
That music whose soft melodies you hear–
gentle, distant, undulating on the wind–
now swells, crescendos. Listen: It is the air filled
with the rustling wings of angels wheeling
overhead in the dusk; it is the murmur
of departed spirits who swim through the sky
as they watch over us. It is the inspiration
which some call god, or Christ, or whatever
immense mystery we feel that impels us
past the insufficient sight lines of our world.
It is the bright summons of the sparrow
calling us to fulfill our days’ enduring duty
to bless the sacred weighty world beyond
the pavement by the side of the road.
copyright Donald Levin 2012
Night Manager at the Palms Theatre, Detroit
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
–Herman Melville
This landlocked vessel on Woodward
topped off my own education
in summer ’71 in the Motor City
following a pallid stretch in higher ed
in the country far from Detroit streets–
there I earned a bachelor’s in bitter ushers
who had been let go from institutions
and stood in the lobby muttering to themselves
about not getting their rights back, to do what
with I never learned; a double degree in
supervising untrained armed guards two weeks
out of the south, faster to take offense
than the patrons they were supposed to keep
calm, who provoked more trouble each night
than they prevented, who thought it was they,
not me, who really ran the operation
on nights when the temperature topped 95
outside the bulletproof red box office
and customers wandered in off hot streets
desperate for a white face to get up into;
a major in shotguns in the closet
in the manager’s office; a master’s
in calling the cops when people who were
asked to leave for bringing in Kentucky
Fried returned, angry, with guns; a minor in
choking down hotdogs that had been rotating
on the cooker on the candy counter
since early morning two days ago;
a certificate in seeking tens of thousands
of missing popcorn cups each Monday
(a mystery finally solved when
the other assistant manager
confessed to stealing them);
a specialization in being teased
by the pregnant cashier who worried
what would happen when her husband finally
realized, in another month, the baby
she was carrying was too pale to be his;
a post-degree in the tough head usher
who scorned my suit and tie, and ignored orders
from someone who knew so little of his life;
and a doctorate in pretending
to be in charge of an occupation army
of theatre staff while chaos ruled unchecked
in the lobby, the auditorium,
the ushers’ and candy girls’ changing rooms,
the balcony, loge, and other realms
I never dared go while the city steamed.
© Donald Levin 2007
