Larry Levis Poems

Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,
...

Someday, when you are twenty-four and walking through
The street of a foreign city...
Let me go with you a little way,
...

The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that
everything was clear,
As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered
...

There is this sunny place where I imagine him.
A park on a hill whose grass wants to turn
Into dust, & would do so if it weren't
...

Some called it the Summer of Love, & although the clustered,
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same
...

I lay my head sideways on the desk,
My fingers interlocked under my cheekbones,
My eyes closed. It was a three-room schoolhouse,
...

All winter
The trees held up their silent hives
As if they mattered.
But on one main street of bars and lights,
...

All night I dreamed of my home,
of the roads that are so long
...

Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
...

Applying to Heavy Equipment School
I marched farther into the Great Plains
And refused to come out.
...