“Beauty on the Wing”, quoted here in full from:
CONTIGUOUS STATES (page 2):
The one time I saw a bird alive in Vietnam
it was in a cage. A large, white cockatoo
bobbing up and down and giving off a cry you might
call human, if you’d never heard a human cry.
The cage was suspended from the branch
of a dead tree by a wire–that one loosely wound
loop was all that kept the spoon-handle of a grenade
from flying off to eternity. Anyone
fool enough to pull on that cage
would become one with the bird
and the spooky trail we stalked along, inhaling
what had defoliated a hectare of jungle.
We were trained to ferret out malefic toys
and tactics, but the rhythm of boredom
and sudden death, the spooling, upland trails of a thousand
tense steps when you didn’t die made for carelessness.
Even those hiding near in wait, who saw you
reach for their ruse, were surprised
to see how even in hell nothing moves
as easy as beauty on the wing.
This poem is so exquisitely well-written, in an order so logical and clear, that its
ending is completely devastating. The bird is an irresistible trap, so obviously dangling
along with a grenade that no soldier should be tempted by it.
The poet has walked this “spooky trail” himself and been taught to “ferret out
malefic toys.” He and the Vietcong are shocked to see this trap work so well. There’s a
gliding sureness to the language of this poem and a tremendous skill at withholding the
grisly details of the ending. We the readers must imagine what is left of the hand and the
body that reached out to this bird, if only because beauty was nowhere else to be found.
Another poem, “Convoys”, shows a Vietnam veteran drinking in Brooklyn with the
poet to inebriation (“we could not walk/but like crabs” ( p 4) and reliving “Homeric
stories of convoys, churning up/and back the corrugated dirt of Highway One…from Phu
Bai to Dong Ha,/Hue to Con Tien,/ Quang Tri to Khe Sahn”(p 5) when one of the
soldiers is instantly killed by shots from an ambush and another hides under his body, the
only cover in a low-sided truck.
In “Disturbing the Peace”, a vet tries to silence his friend in a bar who is beginning to
describe killing someone in Vietnam: “Did you ever wake up in a rice paddy/ and shoot a
fifteen-year-old kid?” (p 11) his friend asks some women in the bar. The poet hustles his
friend outside on the pretense of needing a smoke, and here Levine writes: “Here I will
ask for a privacy you’d extend to lovers, because a complicated intimacy/is at the heart of
what passed between us,/ out there; decades and allegiances carried to/ and laid upon
that rood beam. And I ask, too,/ for the forgiveness reserved for those/ who deserve but
cannot forgive themselves or relieve the burden of carrying/ more than their own time.//
There is a feral loneliness you carry/ from war to your grave.” (p 11)
Another favorite poem from both books (I’m using the pagination of
CONTIGUOUS STATES here) is “Being Touched,” in which the poet rescues a
red-eyed vireo that flew hard into a window, then allowed him to hold it, “each of its
twig-like feet wrapped/ around the ring finger on my right hand. It felt like trust…” (p 54).
There is something miraculous about the bird’s return to the mystic unity of nature as
it flies away: “I knew it would never return/ or forget being touched and held and cared
for. I never do.” (p 54)
I also like “Fences Down”, another bird poem, about a nest being destroyed when a
tree falls in a storm. Most of the poems republished in SELECTED POEMS from
CONTIGUOUS STATES are of equal virtue, many of them nature poems in the light of
D.H. Lawrence — like “Without Angles,” about snakes coiled in a circle of coition,
or “Fishing is Solitary” or “Girls Dream of Toads, Too.”
One of the best is “Graceland” in which the poet hallucinates the ghost of a dead
soldier as he waits in line to visit Elvis’ palatial home. He recalls working with this
soldier in Vietnam, lifting dead soldiers’ bodies into a C-130 plane as the airfield is being
shelled and then over-run by the Vietcong. He also recalls loading this same friend’s
body into a chopper. He ends by saying to his wife at Graceland, “Let’s slather ourselves
in Elvis bling.” (p 17)
One of the truly powerful war poems is “Mud-Walking” quoted here in full from
SELECTED POEMS (page 17):
The year I thought
as many words for mud
as it ladled out for boots–
slogging through two-by-two
in long ballistic lines–I prayed.
I prayed when the monsoon surrounded
the moon and tracers shimmered
over the Perfume River, like ghosts
swimming. I prayed when mud-walking
sounded like chest wounds sucking.
Rice tried to be quiet,
clustered in green columns,
like an army in ambush.
Back home the world quaked
where I stepped, unbalanced,
and someone said, “It’s over, now.”
But for thirty years, the flood
plain of that ghost-river has called
me, like a bell buoy through thick fog.
I’ve navigated its night-shade
tides. I’ve watched it carry people away,
like kites swelled with wind, high
over the delta, the strings strung out far
beyond any way back.
I’ve even seen, through the muddy, conical
glow of a Brooklyn streetlight, rain turn to rice.
Surrounded by love poems, it still holds the center of the book, like a fulcrum. This
is how the past leaks into the present, even in images in which the tracers become
streetlights. This is how exact and powerful the language of these poems is with its
thoroughgoing musicality. Like the original Provencal troubadours, Levine is in fact a
gifted singer and guitarist (though not a lutenist.)
There are poems like “Fall,” so swift they could be by a Chinese poet: (page 21,
SELECTED POEMS)
Here is the left turn
where the road still drops
so suddenly, there is nothing
between us and the far, slow
roll of mountains but the hollow
and the waiting.
We thought we might
disappear into that aching beauty,
and we did. Didn’t we?
Didn’t we fall into that exquisite
embrace with nothing to hold
us up but each other.
Here is a poet unafraid to write the words “aching beauty” in a landscape poem. He
also has a poem with the title “Beauty” (pp 48-49) about an encounter with three deer in a
forest, one deer holding his gaze seemingly forever, because “beauty is so fearsome.” (p
49, SELECTED)
The nature poems are wholly satisfying if only because Levine seems to see himself
as just another critter, and in one poem, “Further On into The Forest”, he climbs a tree
like a raccoon. Is this something Robert Frost would do whose farming seems quite
straightforward though he does like riding birches?
Levine does like to philosophize, as Frost did, enlarging small events to large
proportions. In a villanelle, “Owl Creek Credo”( p 50) Levine IS the owl screeching
“Who hears not the stark song of fear’s dread sum?” (p 50) There’s assonance in
most of Levine’s poems, but here the rhymes are exact.
In “A Common Light” Levine writes, “I am merely swimming in my life,” ( p 52)
and this seems a good description of all his walks and ways. In “If I Were Thich Nhat
Hahn” he imagines sitting against a tree until he becomes a tree. In “You Don’t Miss
Your Water” he declares, “Surely, poetry lives or dies with the flora and fauna.”(p 55)
“Autumn Burn” evokes the old-fashioned autumn smell of smoking leaves, the
sound of preparations for winter like cutting wood, and the vanishing of daylight, the
beginning of chill. “Parting with Distance” describes the pre-migration habits of birds:
“Now flocks, fattening//for flight, sing their delight/ from berry-plumped bush limbs/and
the bunched orange/heights of mountain ash/ crowns…” ( p 58) Such truly sumptuous
Language seems Keatsian.
“In a Blue Wood” is the only ekphrastic poem in these books, and describes a Van
Gogh painting of walkers in a deep wood who walk away from us. The poet seems
tempted to follow.
“A Mother Who Welcomes a Son Home from War” is a complete inversion of the
sentimental poem of the returned soldier. She feels more emotion than he, as if “her
suffering was worse than his.” He thinks she is hugging a corpse: “Well, He is/ dead, a
walking, breathing/ IED or, at best, MIA, unfit and far// from feeling, but for feeling/
strange, far out of place, and/ indifferent to them both.” (p 83, SELECTED POEMS)
A counter-poem to this one is “Challah” which describes the work of a grandfather
who is a professional baker, making bread as a sort of holy task. Another Brooklyn
childhood poem is “and these are the generations…” in which we see Levine’s
grandfather “reading/ a newspaper written in an alphabet that conjured /camels walking,
sitting, and tied together in a caravan/ of ruled lines.” ( p 100). In “Saturday Night Fights”
we meet his father, a prizefighter and see the poet himself fighting in a vacant lot.
There are also love poems in these books and poems about loving the person you are
married to. It’s a complete lifetime even including poems about children and dogs. But
it’s never strained or artificial or inauthentic or foolish, like your average run of poems at
an open mic.
Stephanie Rauschenbusch, American Book Review
Richard Levine is a retired New York City school teacher who taught middle school
children. He has written five chapbooks in addition to CONTIGUOUS STATES.
SELECTED POEMS includes a fine introduction by Carl Rosenstock.