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Unread 06-11-2001, 01:16 PM
jim zola jim zola is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: Greensboro, NC USA
Posts: 5
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Mary,

I am currently shopping for a house in the neighborhood, so I hope to stick around for awhile -- here is the poem I wrote for Levis --

The Poem You Didn't Ask For


I don't need to tell you how silver and black slide from paper
until what remains is smudged beneath the mention
of water, discordant shadows of familiar ghosts. Rumors
thud off the walls of pool halls, Club La Bouche, The Blue Note,
or echo in classrooms swelled with emptiness. Poet dead
at 49. I stare at my hands and see lines
that lead nowhere, lead to a house in the woods
surrounded by jonquil and weeping willow, to lives
barely lived, lead to lines in a poem unwritten. I tried
to write this for years. Each attempt ended without a word,
a blizzard of gestures, as if even a single mark
would be a betrayal. I cannot write elegies.
Your voice made each poem you read grow legs, arms,
its own voice. I remember these things like a deck of cards
spilling from the window of a train. They found you
days after you died from a sudden heart attack.
I suppose in that time between living and what the world
came to know as your death, that your face lost its sharpness,
the lines around the eyes, the mouth, fading, still, until all
that is left are cards face down on the pavement, then white, then gone.

-- for Larry Levis
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