Burned

SEPTEMBER 1990

PHILIP LEVINE

BURNED

I have to go back into the forge room

at Chevy where Lonnie still calls

out his commands to Sweet Pea and Packy

and stare into the fire

until my eyes are also fire

and tear away some piece of my face

because we're all burning in the blood

and it's too late.

I have to walk

the road from here to Bessemer,

Alabama, and arrive on a June night in '48

after work when the men have crowded

around a stalled car and tell them

there's no place to go and

let them take turns beating me

with hands turned to pig iron.

I have to

climb the shaking ladder to the roof

of the nitro plant and tear off

my respirator and breathe the yellow air

the Chaldeans called "the air you must not breathe,"

and sing in the voices

of my fathers calling the children

into prayer while below the stubby canisters

pass labelled, "Chicago," "Amsterdam,"

"Belsen," "Toronto."

I have to swim out

into the flat waters of the great sea

at dawn when the small fishing boats

are coming in and climb aboard the one

with the face of a goddess and the tail

of a goat and let my left cheek

brush against the rough, unshaven cheek

of the old man whose tears-mixed with wine-

watered the beach twenty-one years ago.

And

keep going past the last marker

until I am lost forever, until the sea

and the sky are one, the waves have ceased,

no tide pulls us toward anything and there are

no cries from the drowned.

I have to climb

the slag hills again, but this time not

as a child, and look out over the river of iron,

and hold it all in my eyes,

the river, the iron mountains, the factories

where our brothers burned. I have to repeat

the prayer that we will all go back

to earth one day soon to become earth,

that our tears will run to the sea

a last time and find it open, and our fires

light someone's way home.

In the fullness of a season someone

had to go first into the other kingdom.

Summer in Detroit. The light scattered

into tiny flares at the end of a day

of hard work. Stanley walked his dog,

talking as always to himself, Dorothy

sat on the front porch alone, her skin

iridescent, pearly, her black hair falling

in rich folds over her shoulders, excited

by the knowledge of her changing body.

Blocks away Leo read The Tempest slowly

to himself, stopping now and then to announce

a line out loud-''Thy turfy mountains

where live nibbling sheep"-, his skin

chilled with the glory of language.

I have not brought them together

so their hearts might stutter or stop

with love they can't bear. It is 1944,

Moradian has landed on a Pacific atoll

to become his life forever, Esther's husband

sees the Sherman twenty yards ahead

go up in a flash and knows his is next.

Past midnight Bernard and Arthur vow

to give themselves to music and to poetry.

I do not call out, I do not step forward

out of the chaos of my 16 years to ask

to take their place. 'm too young,

too exhausted, too busy. In the kitchen

I stand at the counter slicing cheese,

salami, rye bread, spreading mayonnaise,

tamping down the lettuce, wrapping

the sandwiches carefully in waxed paper

for tomorrow's lunch the exact way

my grandmother taught me years before,

humming one of my grandfather's tunes,

one he groans out when he sings himself

to sleep, tapping his foot, swinging

from side to side as though he were burning.

A burned car left in a field

of sassafras, the long green shoots

through the windows and doors where no

doors remain. The kids don't come by

after school to carve their names

on the dashboard or pull the steering wheel

to avoid the inevitable. Rocks, tires,

cases of empties, an old couch sagging

into weeds, the cushions blooming.

I lived here once, in a house

now gone. A friend visited me

at dusk, and she brought a paper parcel

of cookies tied with a ribbon. Even then

we were scared of the silence that followed

whatever we gave each other. I would

walk her to the bus stop on Second Avenue,

and we'd wait in silence in the dense air

of a March night as slow rain

fell into the last snow. I'd come back

alone, sober, singing to a starless sky,

singing recklessly out of a boy's

throat, past the darkened rows

of sleeping two-storey houses

that have all gone up in smoke.

Yom Kippur

in the New World.

Los Angeles hums

a little tune-

trucks down

the coast road

for Monday market

packed with small faces

blinking in the dark.

My mother dreams

by the open window.

On the drainboard

the gray roast humps

untouched, the oven

bangs its iron jaws,

but it's over.

Before her on the table

set for so many

her glass of fire

goes out.

The childish photographs,

the letters and cards

scatter at last.

The dead dream alone

toward dawn.

Why am I going away from the glass of wine,

from the loaf of bread?

Why am I not mourning the tiny death

of the sparrow

who leaped on the lowest branches

of the Atlas cedar

until one morning he was drawn

into tall burned grass?

What will I say when the nights grow,

when the day dies into the violet haloes

of exhaust?

No one takes my hand and leads me to bed,

to the mouth-to-mouth agonies of darkness.

How will I know I was and I was alive

when this passes?

Who will take my hand and lead me to you?

Who will take my hand that is on fire,

that smells of earth,

that is burning now to an autumnal rust?

Who will lead me to the ceremonies of sorrow?

Who will lead me?

I was burned,

she said, and lifted her blouse to show

me the curious pale mottling along

the lines of her belly, still smooth. "He

said he adored my white skin, creamy.

Can a Jew imagine what a real

white woman looks like all over? All

your life you dream of someone like me,

every night of your life." Her green eyes

on fire with her own memories

of herself 40 years ago. She shakes her head

awake and still goes on. "Not with cigarettes,

you moron. Would a man like that, richer

than God, burn his only beloved with

cigarettes? Cigars, imported Havanas, nothing

but the best!"

And she's gone, thank God,

slamming the door on me, gone back

to the one life she clings to. The room

is quiet, ashamed, the books gawk down

from their shelves, not one

with a word to tell me what it is like

to enter the fires of your own making, naked,

day after day, until the burning becomes

a sweetness.

The day you left I walked

alone for hours down the crowded streets

hearing and seeing no one until I

caught the cries of a drunken woman

behind me. She had lost her husband, .

left him in a bar, was alone, frightened,

calling for help. I kept walking

with her behind me, calling.

The houses along the canals were closing

up, turning their eyes inward,

listening to the rumbling of their furnaces

or their human groans. This day will end,

I told myself, this pain will pass.

I will waken to my life. The evening

spread from the great oaks

that lined the emptying boulevards

or descended in bits of ashes and dust

from a deepening sky. I turned at last

to behold the woman whose grief

was louder than mine. There was

only a child, her right hand closed

tight on a handkerchief knotted at one end

with some coins and a note, a little girl

who seeing my eyes filled with tears

began to cry as she smiled.

Two ten-inch phonograph records, Bluebirds,

going white, that won't give up their music.

My uncle's perfect cloth bound book

that opened the secret of electric growth.

My mother's gap-toothed tortoise combs.

My father's Victoria Cross he brought back

from an automobile parts convention

in Chicago. His white gold pocket watch,

a Howard, that runs and stops and runs

to keep his time. His naturalization papers

claiming he was born in 1898 in Poland,

without a mention of his years at war.

My brother's smeared grade school drawings

of Spitfires, Stukas, ME 109s,

his "Withdrawal from Dunkirk," the beach

crisscrossed with small black lines

that could be abandoned arms or the arms

of boys hugging. My stillborn sister's

wish to mother a child, to breathe

the stained air that blows in at dusk

from the parking lots, to walk with us

on Sunday afternoons. Your fingerprints

on the final application for release.

A bitten fountain pen, a dry stamp pad.

Two clear drops of fluid that catch

and hold the artificial light, that glow

with their own light when that's gone

as eyes in stories are said to do.

Now in the dark they could be you,

they could be me, they could be anyone.

I stop at the borders of dreams.

I ask who you are, whispering

in my ear all these years, you

to whom I've said all I can say.

I hold my two hands upward

toward the light now sifting

from the air. That is the shape

of eternity: five long fingers

and a palm broadened and carved

by use. When I looked

in my heart and found only

questions, when I walked

beside the ditch at dusk

and asked the sun,

the answer was curled

quietly in my pocket. "Look at

them both," you say, "turn them

over and place them on the table

before you. Don't be afraid.

They are you, familiar at times,

overlooked, despised. Now,

go back the way you came, down

the same old streets where you

grew to a name and a single face.

That was home, you said, and today

it is nothing, not even a closet

of unread books. Here is home.

Close your eyes. You are on

a dark plain. The hot winds

breathe in and out. You're laughing!

You asked for a home, you crossed

the earth, you sat speechless,

you questioned the closed door,

'Are you there?' No one answered

because all the time it was you."

If I called you "my soul," you'd

laugh in my face. If I went

down on my knees to you as to

a god or a beloved, you'd turn

to the window, shake your head,

and talk to the last of the garden.

At the end of September I may

ask the trees to hold still

in the west wind. I may scold

the flicker hiding in the shade

of an orange tree. His feathers

scatter and settle in the trough

of each wave. He is not

a religious object nor is

the wind sacred, smelling

as it does of cold salt

and sea life. I have been here

so long the bleached hairs

quivering on my hands remember

the years before the flood.

The whites of my eyes, no longer

white, stared into fire when fire

was ours, and I am only

so much salt, water, and stone

smelling of iron. I can talk

to you and though my answers

will scatter like feathers in wind,

you may write them down on paper

that burns even in sunlight.

Get what you can, says the flicker;

remorseless, he shoulders his way

into light and then into air.

What does he care that the year

winds down? That the west wind

smells of ice? That what went out

as lies and so much bad breath

came home as the final truth?

The outskirts of our least favorite city,

the one bombed and burned from the inside

by its own citizens-along the fence

small climbing roses bloom in April,

the hardier ones hang on long

past the better days, and late autumn

brings tiny crystals glistening

on the cheeks of the blackened petals.

Spading the gray soil, I think

of begonias and how their buds redden

even without rain and of the wild iris-

flags we called them-that won't live

in the rich beds, though they survive

fire and hail, outbattling tough weeds

to spring up where houses once were.

Poking among these ruins for rocks

for the garden, I unearth bricks

from a familiar fireplace or a slab

of stone that crowned a hearth, remnants

of my lost neighbors. Spilling

the kernels of carrot seeds

into my palm and the black pips

of radishes, I know something

will come from this root and wood

thickened ground. With a stick I scrape

a trough for planting. I remember

the unloved lamb become a sheep I saw

on his way to slaughter. Like me, he shook

his lowered head as though he knew

the way home, that head dirty with curls.

I was small once, hardly bigger

than the laughter of a lemon and like

a lemon I had come into a life

no one would question, an oily rind,

closed volumes of flesh, and seeds

as smooth as pearls. Even then

you could talk, you were immense

with the desire to touch each leaf,

each small animal that rose

from his lair. Later,

even you who could love rind,

seeds, oil, flesh, let your name

slip from your tongue to become

nonsense, let salt rain down

into the fields and surrendered

all you'd seen, you who had

eaten the earth gave back ashes.

So, it is time we left.

Take the small, empty purse

your mother carried across an ocean,

take the little book of songs

the children taught you, take

your teeth and your fingernails

and the white scars on your belly

and meet me where the road

vanishes into the hillside.

How will you know me?

I won't be tall or dressed

for dinner or carrying a dark bag,

I won't be whistling like a bird

or your father coming home from work,

I won't be anyone you ever

spoke to or fell asleep beside

or wakened to. I won't be sorry

for you, I won't take your hand

or come forward and touch

your hair or kiss your cheek.

There, between the two sullen elms

without leaves, the ones that died

years ago, do you see a shadow?

It could be the birth we gave

back to the rain. It could be

the silence after love or just pain

without hope or the need to dance.

It looks alive, even in the darkness,

it looks as though it were growing

smaller and smaller, but it's

not a patch of snow. It could be

a whisper, a secret never kept,

everything your heart knew

and you forgot. Don't ask.

.

Give me your hand, and [ll count

each finger twice and put them to sleep

with a name more cold and remote

than a star's. They don't move,

not even to breathe, not even

to search for water or to embrace

another hand. This is the way

things become as we return closer

and closer to air that simply is,

stained by a day not yet here.

A woman gets out of bed and goes

to the window to see if the birds

have wakened and sees the houses

have gone, the trees have turned

inward to become so many pages

unmarked by mistakes. She says

nothing to herself. She makes the bed

and washes the one plate, the cup,

the little spoon and fork. She dries

them carefully and lets them fall

one by one into the garbage.

.

Here it comes.

It's been quiet. If you'd bothered

you'd have heard finches in the trees

and the wind sighing out back and wires

humming in the voices of wire, you

could have heard a country asleep

except for the people down under

stoking the furnaces and the ones

way up changing the light bulbs.

No more. Because here it comes!

The big wave the moon's been holding

back and the Rocky Mountains

of ice water. Now the clouds of locusts

waiting since Genesis swoop on Kansas

and eat wheat and carry off the cows.

Hear the constant hum? That's California

on its knees chanting to keep safe

its vintage wines and swimming pools

and the false gods of their movies

and the true dead ones in our hearts.

Los Angeles, Seattle, New York City,

Detroit, Washington, all down the drain.

Now you can hear again, finches

in the golden voices of finch, the wind

saying it best as only the old wind

can, blowing over centuries of nothing,

blowing every which way it wants, blowing.

Once in a park in Paris an old woman

seized two coins nesting on my open palm.

I grabbed the offending hand, closed

now like a tiny steel cage, and twisted

while she gasped and tore at my hand

with her nails. At last one dark tear

dripped from her nose and the two coins fell

into the grass. When I put a shoe over them

she cried to the low clouds scudding overhead

that all men were strangers and sons of whores.

Leaving the coins, I stood and walked away.

I did not have to turn to know that smile-

I'd seen it on my own face, l'd known

the same hump in my shoulders, the cold

gleaming in my eyes, and wanted not to see.

"What if grass were bread?" my son asked me

a week before when the plane broke through

the dense rain and we beheld the green world.

I had no answer. When we landed

I bought money with money, forgetting

that each dollar spent was so much time

staring into faces that answered nothing.

Later, in the hotel, my kids played

with the elevator until the old concierge

hissed at them in French, and they roared

out the laughter of boys and refused to stop.

When he came to my door to complain

I answered that in the West grass was bread.

He held his pudgy hands over his breast

to deliver his truths of waste and use.

How many years had he gone faithfully

from room to room turning out lights,

searching for loose change? How many days

had he ended by reheating lunch and praying?

I consider the long fields that blaze

in early March across the lower hills

of the great Sierras. I cannot answer.

I remember a warm bakery in winter north

of the village of Lorca where I bought bread,

the women smiling at me and giving me

the first place in line. Bread so stale

it shattered into shards as sharp as glass

when we tried to break it. My kids,

my wife, and I howled with glee.

The father had returned, his face full

of trust, bearing the gifts of earth.

It was afternoon, cold, and we had hours to go,

we had sour red wine and empty stomachs.

To enter the fire

is to be burned, said Leo Maryk, slumped

on the loading dock behind Kelsey-Hayes.

He'd read it somewhere, maybe the Epistles

of Paul or one of the early Fathers,

Augustine or Ambrose. On a night like this

they all ran together in his head.

"Some kind of priest I'll make," he laughed.

Even in the cold I could see the sweat

running down the long, jagged nose, the steam

rising from his enormous chest as from

an oven as he clenched and unclenched

his gloved hands. "A man the size

of me terrified of every little woman,

afraid to live the life my father lived,

I even changed my name." Marikowski asking me

what was love if he couldn't feel it

with his body? what was it? Asking me,

a kid more ignorant than he. Above us a low sky,

the slag heaps burning slowly toward a day

that never came, the others-men and women-

passing in and out of the same fires

they never saw into the world.

Once I believed I lived these closed

rows of tenements, the shotgunned houses

bunched uselessly against the coming

of another day. Now the stars settle

down, easing themselves into the river.

Shivering with delight, they almost

go out, but a high wind fans the little

separate points of flame. An ore boat

passes upriver. Riding soundlessly

the other way, another parts the waters

toward seven oceans and an older world.

The slow windward motion of the stars.

Late rain falling for hours

between the squat, closed houses.

Then silence, the town asleep, the light

not yet arrived where a single shade is torn

or a door leans ajar. A wagon pulled

down the bricked alley, and there is milk,

bread in cold packages, white, untouched.

Imagine the darkness drawn away,

the new day falling equitably

in the valleys of the living. Imagine

all the long morning fathers rising

with their wives, children making way

for children at sink and table on a day

without work or school until dusk

shatters the golden windows.

Imagine it.

The first time we entered

the city, it was late afternoon, Friday,

behind miles of trucks and old cars spewing

everywhere. Past closed warehouses

of gray cotton cloth, factories, low-built

laboratories grinding out antibiotics

and corn plasters. Each time the traffic

stalled we sat in stunned silence. This

would be home. Before long we

found a room and entered the darkness

together, holding each other

as long as we could in the hope

we would be home.

Morning. On the street

a tiny man leans back planting

his heels as six greyhounds tug him

toward the single tree. Our old friends

the sparrows busy in the gutters turning

yesterday's papers for a hint of the truth.

A blue sky enters from nowhere. A truck

delivers oranges and red sacks of milk.

Air so clear I can see all the way down

the Ramblas to where the sea goes out

on its one voyage, all the way up

to the Holy Mountain from which the devil

said, "Behold, it shall be yours, all

the kingdoms below," and we made our choice.

Rain falling into the dry canals

east of here. Old couches, magazines,

dinettes-their legs skyward-, car seats

unstick slowly from the gray mud and drift

spinning toward the little dams and weirs.

A skirt, stained with wine or blood, fills

with water and swirls to the surface,

a carton of empty beer cans like trophies.

A black setter comes toward me, springing

easily along the bank, his long head

hung low, his coat soaked and heavy,

and passes without a sign.

Another day.

The sun still up past six, the dark clouds

gone into the foothills or farther,

the clear sky darkening. The water

moves swiftly past islands of calm

and darkness. I glimpse a root, bare

and silvery, groping upward through air,

an open hand of black branches breaks

the surface for a moment and then

turns under and closes up. Somewhere

a light comes on in a living room,

someone I don't know pauses at

the window before the last light goes

and speaks to me.

One great room, the moon

sliding through the trailing wisps

of clouds or dust clouds. The child

gone under in clear water years ago,

the sad yelps of brothers and sisters

that went on and on until morning

quiet at last. The earth's own sighs,

the day's last breath going out,

my own silent cry of denial. They're

all asleep, all the windows from here

to the end of the world are open,

and I can hear the even breathing

of all that was wordless and final

singing together tonight

in the rising voices of the unforgiven.