All Poems

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For The Country

© Philip Levine

THE DREAMThis has nothing to do with war
or the end of the world. She
dreams there are gray starlings
on the winter lawn and the buds

Voyages

© Philip Levine

Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue weed, wart --
I walk by sedge and brown river rot
to where the old lake boats went daily out.
All the ships are gone, the gray wharf fallen

The Red Shirt

© Philip Levine

"...his poems that no one reads anymore become dust, wind, nothing,
like the insolent colored shirt he bought to die in."
-Vargas Llosa

The New World

© Philip Levine

A man roams the streets with a basket
of freestone peaches hollering, "Peaches,
peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale."

A Theory Of Prosody

© Philip Levine

When Nellie, my old pussy
cat, was still in her prime,
she would sit behind me
as I wrote, and when the line

The Helmet

© Philip Levine

All the way
on the road to Gary
he could see
where the sky shone

Any Night

© Philip Levine

Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas pine,
the yellowing ash, all the trees
are gone, and I was older than
all of them. I am older than the moon,

Ode For Mrs. William Settle

© Philip Levine

In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken

House Of Silence

© Philip Levine

The winter sun, golden and tired,
settles on the irregular army
of bottles. Outside the trucks
jostle toward the open road,

Smoke

© Philip Levine

Back then we called this a date, some times
a blind date, though they'd written back and forth
for weeks. What actually took place is now lost.
It's become part of the mythology of a family,

Once

© Philip Levine

Hungry and cold, I stood in a doorway
on Delancey Street in 1946
as the rain came down. The worst part is this
is not from a bad movie. I'd read Dos Passos'

The Rains

© Philip Levine

The river rises
and the rains keep coming.
My Papa says
it can't flood for

Belle Isle, 1949

© Philip Levine

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,

Everything

Lately the wind burns
the last leaves and evening
comes too late to be
of use, lately I learned

Premonition At Twilight

The magpie in the Joshua tree
Has come to rest. Darkness collects,
And what I cannot hear or see,
Broken limbs, the curious bird,

M. Degas Teaches Art & Science At Durfee Intermediate School--Detroit, 1942

He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
diagonally downward and stood back
to ask, looking as always at no one

Another Song

Words go on travelling from voice
to voice while the phones are still
and the wires hum in the cold. Now
and then dark winter birds settle

The Dead

A good man is seized by the police
and spirited away. Months later
someone brags that he shot him once
through the back of the head

Detroit Grease Shop Poem

Four bright steel crosses,
universal joints, plucked
out of the burlap sack --
"the heart of the drive train,"

The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.