Michael H. Levin: Poems and Prose
SOUTH FORK, SECOND FORTY
(For Bill Steiger of Wisconsin, 1938-1978)
I.
Brown shoots, brown fields
their harvest lopped
blow into husks now,
blow to the west, where
flurries in the dust announce
the coming of first snow.
Beyond the dust balls, brute
and benign as sleeping teams
oceanic earth outrolls the eye,
clasps and uncoils its scalloped waves
to break upon the plains.
This was your land, not mine:
what do I know -- a city brat,
brassy with books and big-time dreams --
of roots and fly-times
space so huge
it hunkers down the mind,
the anvil hammers of the year
on stolid farmers German in their beds?
II.
Centrifugal air
whips past along these flats,
sandblasts my cheeks
and funnels its scarab buzz
beside my ears.
The path peters to burrs.
Though I walk it
like boys in berry time
each pocket packed with memories,
frost’s a poor blanket
for a dozing friend.
III.
Pass by. New flakes sift,
gentle amnesiacs,
crowning each withered leaf with bells.
Your bright anticipating glance
the limber cadence of your clipped hello
that happy will, uncynical
as summer wheat, are gone
and life’s unstallioned.
IV.
We are time’s spume,
mere molecules in motion
turned translucent
where the light strikes,
mingling our selves as streams twine
in that running tide.
Hold to that: know
each Brownian being
though blind and disconnected
is runed with the prints of the past.
Consigned to rootlessness
and filigreed with spray and hope
we rise like Nereids
to a surface of choice chosen,
chance without accident,
our only course the one
Poseidon knew:
to learn
the serenity of random meetings,
saddle the full flood,
swing up, mount
and ride the white-necked horses
of that sea.
Wisconsin Review, 1980