Two Poems by Philip Levine

You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work

and climbs the stairs to our room.

I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop   

one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window   

and his unshaven face is whitened

like the face of the moon. He will sleep

long after noon and waken to find me gone.

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 labors, hands   

yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps   

for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

All night at the ice plant he had fed

the chute its silvery blocks, and then I   

stacked cases of orange soda for the children   

of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time

with always two more waiting. We were twenty   

for such a short time and always in

the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt

and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.

In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded

by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes   

of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,   

no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,

for there was no such year, and now

that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,

calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds,   

wedding certificates, drivers licenses.

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.   

The ice to standing pools or rivers

racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose   

between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. I give you back 1948.   

I give you all the years from then

to the coming one. Give me back the moon   

with its frail light falling across a face.

Give me back my young brother, hard

and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse   

for God and burning eyes that look upon   

all creation and say, You can have it.

Nelle Isle, 1949

We stripped in the first warm spring night

and ran down into the Detroit River

to baptize ourselves in the brine

of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,

melted snow. I remember going under

hand in hand with a Polish high school girl

I'd never seen before, and the cries

our breath made caught at the same time

on the cold, and rising through the layers

of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere

that was this world, the girl breaking

the surface after me and swimming out

on the starless waters towards the lights

of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks

of the old stove factory unwinking.

Turning at last to see no island at all

but a perfect calm dark as far

as there was sight, and then a light

and another riding low out ahead

to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers

walking alone. Back panting

to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare

fall on, the damp piles of clothes,

and dressing side by side in silence

to go back where we came from.

Philip Levine is the author of 25 books of poetry: On the Edge, Stone Wall Press, 1961, 1963; Silent in America: Vivas for Those Who Failed, Shaw Avenue Press, 1965;  Not This Pig, Wesleyan University Press, 1968; 5 Detroits, Unicorn Press, 1970; Thistles: A Poem Sequence, Turret Books, 1970; Red Dust, Kayak, 1971; Pili's Wall, Unicorn Press, 1971, 1980; They Feed They Lion, Atheneum, 1972, 1999; 1933, Atheneum, 1974; New Season, Graywolf Press, 1975; On the Edge and Over: Poems Old, Lost, and New, Cloud Marauder, 1976; The Names of the Lost, Windhover Press, 1976; 7 Years from Somewhere, Atheneum, 1979; Ashes: Poems New and Old, Atheneum, 1979; One for the Rose, Atheneum, 1981; Selected Poems, Atheneum, 1984; Sweet Will, Atheneum, 1985; A Walk with Tom Jefferson, Knopf, 1988; New Selected Poems, Knopf, 1991; What Work Is, Knopf, 1991; The Simple Truth, Knopf, 1994; Unselected Poems, Greenhouse Review Press, 1997; The Mercy, Knopf, 1999; Breath: Poems, Knopf, 2004; News of the World, Knopf, 2009.

His poems have been published in various periodicals such as Poetry, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Hudson Review, Paris Review, Harper's, Washington Post, Nation, North American Review, and many others. Among his many awards and recognitions are the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry and the Wallace Stevens Award. He was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006 and in 2011 was appointed poet laureate of the United States.   

Philip Levine (January 10, 1928 - February 14, 2015)