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540b35a
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I find you in these tears, few,
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Philip Levine |
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267127c
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How weightless words are when nothing will do.
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words
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Philip Levine |
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4487d03
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Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.
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poetry
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Philip Levine |
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c05e506
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We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You ..
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poetry
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Philip Levine |
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a0f1d30
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Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life, and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands
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Philip Levine |
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0bdbdef
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Oh, yes, let's bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let's bless the visionary power of the human-- the only animal that's got it--, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.
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Philip Levine |
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7e8c1be
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As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life."
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Philip Levine |
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4803093
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The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there's only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don't ask myself what I'm looking for. I didn't come for answers to a place like this, I came to walk on the earth, still cold, still silent. Still ungiving, I'v..
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poetry
words
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Philip Levine |
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a5a4e01
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The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on..
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Philip Levine |
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cb494bc
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From they sack and they belly opened
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Philip Levine |
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59c35eb
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No one that night turned into literature, nothing that we did or didn't entered the mythology of boys growing into men or girls fighting to be people.
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Philip Levine |
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714a74f
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The earth drinks all that's left of you and asks for more.
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Philip Levine |
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6dd64a0
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If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion. Actually she is in the dark, for the
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Philip Levine |
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ffff90d
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If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion.
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Philip Levine |
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c257cf0
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To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn't know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number.
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Philip Levine |
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a81ba54
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with no morning the day is sold.
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philiplevine
poetry
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Philip Levine |
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9d0eb59
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Poetry is like truth: on one level it simply is, and as such it is available to anyone. Anyone, that is, who will spend himself or herself to receive it, for no one has an inherent right to truth. One must earn it, and one earns the truth by honoring it, by treasuring it in a thousand daily acts, by shaping one's life to both give it and receive it. The emperors have their treasures, and we have ours. [Larry] Levis said it perfectly when he..
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Philip Levine |
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91edada
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He embodied what he worshipped, the exquisite in the commonplace...salt for the spirit.
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Philip Levine |
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dc2f01b
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If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with / a starless dark. The day will become something / it's never been before, something for / which I have no name.
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Philip Levine |
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5098b30
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Let Me Begin Again" Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly and changes nothing. Let me go back to land after a lifetime of going nowhere. This time lodged in the feathers of some scavenging gull white above the black ship that docks and broods upon the oily ..
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Philip Levine |
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5b2ba9a
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I speak to H. in a bar in downtown L.A. Over a schooner of beer he waits out the day
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Philip Levine |