Dana Levin

Dana Levin was born in 1965, grew up in Lancaster, California, and graduated from Pitzer College and the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. Her poems have appeared in many national magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Levin’s first book, In the Surgical Theatre (American Poetry Review, 1999) was honored with the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and the PEN/Osterweil Award. Her second book of poems is Wedding Day (Copper Canyon, 2005). Levin has received three Pushcart Prizes, an NEA Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and directs the Creative Writing Program at College of Santa Fe.

Ars Poetica (the idea)

would it wake the drowned out of their anviled sleep—

would it slip the sun like a coin behind their eyes—

*

The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos

left in matter—a little bit of not-yet in everything that was—

so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions—

the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid—

was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope,

leaving things unfinished?

as if in completing a sentence there was death—

Chill Core

Are you becoming enslaved

to a bad idea? That it all

just happened

like wind or sky,

that there was nothing human in it—it was just

part of the elements, an abuse

cosmic

in its inevitable rounds—

I know, they were like lights, the moon bitter and the sun furious

in a single sky,

you the dumb substance

lodged in the alfalfa waving in acres,

bound to the rage,

the shriveling light—

Can you see that you’re not there anymore?

You’re here,

in this dream, at the shore of a vast and slow-petalled sea,

the top of your skull perched

on your open palm—

The wind is moving

through the convolutions, a frost dusting

the gray ridges

of your open brain, glinting in the frigid

light—

The white question is opening

in your left hand,

the bone you can dig with, that can upend

the memory

of being human

locked in the brain’s chill core—

that being of grief and terror

I will help you assemble here.

Glass Heart

could the West creep in to your idea of happiness—abundance

which gave no comfort,

in which your loneliness was spared—

*

The student wrote: she wipes tears from her heart.

Forgotten, on the kitchen table—glassy, beaded with sweat—

The line is too sentimental, said the teacher, unless I see it literally: taking a sponge to the anatomical heart, wiping and wiping the tears off it—

glass heart, so transparent—the tears drove around its autobahn

Then the kids came home and found it pulsing there. Like in a washing machine, you could see the grief go round and round—

The student wrote: sucking tears out of her aorta with a straw—

a bitterness so pronounced it was a kind of ammonia, a world in which one could lose one’s parents and be put on a train alone—

Her grandfather had owned a little store for years. They can shoot out the windows, he would say, wagging a finger, as long as they don’t set the street on fire—

glass heart, so transparent

Was it their mother’s, their father’s? It lay weeping in the heat. But they had to leave, to help deliver groceries—

The student wrote: in my left my heart my right my bone, beating my heart like a bloody drum—

Ovens, the grandfather muttered. In Russia they ate us raw.

so transparent

Meal after meal no one claimed it. After awhile no one saw it, though it ticked at the center of the table like a clock—

singing O, this sack of water, swaying on its hook of bone.

Cinema Verité

And the lights go down—

hush.

And a light comes up—

the screen.

That brightens, so well, our dark day.

That brightens

to a fountain in a square,

dolphins without their tails—

without their heads.

Just their arched backs

crowning a chaos of broken nymphs, what’s left

of the government

of the sea—

The light shifts.

Widens.

Black-and-white

necklace of fires

erupting from the gas line, buildings bereft

of façades—

strangers picking through a desolation, passports,

lovers,

gone—

then weeping in French.

Then credits in French in Czech in Deutsch then

the Village cafés, joie

to the nth

degree—

trumpeting out, like loud flowers,

along Bleecker Street.

After which there’s a drink.

Then a toke, beside the garbage cans—

And then a late train and a key in the lock and the lights going up

in the den of the metropolitan

twelve o’clock

with its last

hopeful seconds, that we won’t

go to bed bored—

*

Hush.

Thoughts everywhere taxiing hurriedly.

A little like New York, isn’t it,

ceaseless hive, humming despite a historical

exhaustion—Outside

the sky’s

apartment panorama. Every twelfth window blued

with light—

beacons of the bag-eyed tribe called

Who Bricked the Doorway to Sleep—

3 A.M., slumped on the couch, to surf

the blood

and promise:

dances to banish the hunch’n’shiver

the Claritin the Klonopin new

kind of soap for an old kind of stain, channels

surging toward the sea—

*

Wire of light.

Dawn sheen

thin along the river.

Burrowing

into every screen in your single room

like an I.V.,

feeding the face that will medicate

the blood in the day,

anchor

tethering you

to news—

until you step out

into the afternoon glare,

snap on the dark lenses,

foam of gray speakers into your ears and pump up

a perfect noise

to soundtrack the filmed-over day—

thinking, What time does it start.

thinking, I am so late.

thinking, Not the 6 but the B, the B to the N, the N

to the light

flooding the stairs up to Union Square and opening out

onto a kind of joy, the escape into the art

of another country’s pain,

and then the screen fades and the people stand and the bright suffering

comes to an end—

No.

Yes.

How.