Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Elegy in Istanbul

What's given up amazes everyone,
     as the wonder of what remains-pink and tender-

each body celebrates its losses, body leaving body,
     arcing out in dimmed rhythm like the seer

who rubs your shoulders hard enough
     to press out virgin oil, and later others wash

the towels until the last traces vanish from the nap-
     linens shelved into one long ballet blanc.

Two smocked women in a narrow room strip
     layers from an antique canvas-

scuff through to faintest pentimento,
     a master's oils alloyed in a crucible of berries, roots.

So meticulously they work, they start to love their hands,
     love each layer as it flowers beneath their hands.

The layers flake to dust, settle like hoarfrost
     to the pitted floor.

At day's end, flecked smocks pegged, the linings warm
     and worn, abalone buttons fracture

under jaded fingers like dime-store paint, half-
     Caravaggio, half-mystic, these artisans,

their patience out of nothing, but somewhere
     something solid lives.  As there,

through the half-light of dusk, someone's returning berries
     to the berry bush, replacing each just so,

and in winter, too.

Finger Painting

In the corner of my study, a yellow sun,
my own boy's brightest yet, whistling in the pigment,
ringing through the center, out beyond the edges
and onto his shirt and cuffs with its blinding arms,
its god-giving light,

and I start daubing it myself,
five wet fingers in the cool, wet paints-
my fingers twist the shapes of crooked streets,
slurring thumbs through the pigment-ooze-

dark figures melt into whitewashed tavernas
where heart-throbs sing generic love songs, the ones
you hear in Venice or Madrid, or heard once
when travel happened slowly, and you held back
the curtained windows as music lifted
off the cobblestones and cool palms pressed
your shoulders, a low front gathering off the coast.

The art paper stiffens under paint.  That smell-
oil, vanilla, nail polish, ice?  Last time
I sat here dazed, the maple outside burned
bright enough to blind me, and sugar sap ran
black and wet through the bark
where a ten-penny nail pinned the sparrow feeder
to the tree and it took me, my wife said, all day
to hear her knocking at the door.

The Misunderstanders

What the Lord keeps secret is no
concern of yours.
                -Ecclesiastes 3:21

so it must be there, locked inside the ink,
locked inside the obedient and trembling hand
that held the pen, before the hand turned to stone
and the kiss to stone and the stone kept its counsel.

There's the face of God, his arm and fingers, mouth-
but when it came to breathing life into Adam
the Lord sent an angel, a second,
who must have liked it here among us
or liked the kissing too,
because he drew back ten thousand more-
angels who surround us in our beds and at our tables- 
the front seats our cars,
but have trouble with our language.

Male bodies they have, says the Talmud,
indistinguishable from God himself,
but for the wings, or do I just imagine wings
the way I see our passions having wings?

These messengers, then, take orders,
make deliveries: breath of life, kiss of death,
and always overhearing but not getting what we say.

Better not to understand,
and better still, raise misunderstanding to an art,
There's an ironic God for you-a God worth knowing.

A rueful God-

I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created-
Men together with the beasts,
creeping things, and birds of the sky;
For I regret that I made them.

Does his love for Moses turn to stone?
"One kiss may ruin a human life."
I forget who said it.

Some presume when God turned his back
he only meant to hide his genitals,
turn away and fasten up his robe.

God has genitals?
So then the angels.

Still, God trusts none of them,
none of us.

Who's more guarded than this God of ours,
blessed be he, keeper of secrets,
who sends his angels to watch us in our daily lives,
and causes them to misunderstand?

Liturgy

If there must be a god in the house . . .
Let him move as sunlight moves on the floor
-Wallace Stevens

All this year our weather happened indoors.
All light, borrowed light.

The lake, the predawn glow of cabins on the shore,
an anchor lamp, the incandescent moon.
All burned a taller, darker twin on water.

Endless, our gift for complicating simplest things.

A breeze lifts the curtain of an open window.
From some other room, bright, crystalline bars,
and then low bars of piano, some old air.

Slight acrid scent, astringent polish, rubbing alcohol.

I enter the small chapel at San Juan Capistrano
where Junípero Serra celebrated mass,
kneel to say a prayer for my brother,
a prayer that pleads like a scalpel, or should,
but a camera flashes at the rear.

Tourists examine the crucifix; one laughs.
They come to feed the birds.
This day I make for the sun-stippled cloister.

Confluence of earth, cut of land, or its fold,
bleaching sky, swath of wind, length
of shadows.  One has only to love
what ripens: Yesterday.

the sweet corn wasn't ready,
tomorrow will be too late.
Light the fire beneath the pot.

Andes

Quito perches mid-planet, mid-cloud,
higher peaks rising up and up,
east and west, like green imperial armies,
walling the city on both flanks-
volcanic bird, her feet dusted with ash.

She breathes the inconsequence sea level,
the distant inconsequence of sea,
and speaks a language swimming
in too thin air, too thick with idioms-
a tongue that loves its vowels, worships consonants-
her counterpoint, dashing and languid,
stocky, mustachioed and suave.

I think you'd like this city.
I think it would appeal to some part of you that wants-
I don't know-wants.

Presumptuous of me, yes, but listen:
twenty multi-colored flags, flutes and condors,
and the sky parched blue-gray and mutable.
Clouds slide overhead like fresh lava-
equatorial brilliance cooling to burnt toast
and back again, the light changing by themselves
into more than themselves-
that sort of want-
the kind that lasts and outlasts.

You'd melt at the exchange orate of illumination-
merest gossamer to blinding incandescence,
mild yellows, greens, indigo, violet-
then fields of glint, glare, glow seizing
the white colonial facades,
buffing the tile-domed churches
and iron statutes, polishing 
  the Winged Madonna on the mount,
  her face awash in luster and lava, wanting
  everything at once for us,
  wanting for nothing at all.

Vincent's Audition

A little worn, but trim, Van Gogh watches the auction
from a folding chair in the back row.
In Christie's, nobody recognizes him.
He'd like to have the painting back, hang it
above the sofa in his Hoboken loft,
but there's just a handful of guilders
and two francs in his purse.

In his dream he saw her agin.
Parched lawns overgrown with thistle.
Death had transformed her into a student
from a religious school, a pious girl
in a long-sleeved dress, which came down past her ankles.
Walking along a rusty irrigation pipe, he followed,
her back dissolved in silver haze.

At the wood's edge she stopped and turned,
forehead glowing in the moonlight.
A skeletal pallor covered her cheeks,
teeth gleaming, her eyes hidden
by the dark glasses of the blind,
she pointed with dry fingers at her brother,
"Look what they've done to you."

Through closed windows high above the auction,
the sound of a cello-
someone practicing a passage over and over.
If only he could change his material state,
become air, or stone, or crane.

Searching for a tablet and charcoal,
he studies the young woman on the dias,
the way she brings her hair forward
until it spreads over her dress, covers her left breast-
he follows her in his mind through streets and alleys,
gates and flights of steps, stone-paved courtyards.
He has no palette to stop her.
Nothing to stop himself.

It rained. Not hard.  Not pouring.
A thick dampness in the air.
Van Gogh remembered the mailbox key
still lying on his desk.

Certain that God is not religious,
even so, while watching a sudden storm overtake
a wheat field flocked with crows,
he once saw the world created new.

In the morning, he'll open his shutters
on the beginning of a winter day-
a nameless feeling in the dove-colored light-
a contentment lighter than any in life.

The Turning

It's not been cold this winter.  But tonight-
the ground is hard and grassless, rhododendron leaves
warp tight against the chill,
the sky is clear and piped with stars.

There's the smell of wood smoke and something faintly arctic-
an Inuit's fire-two brown-toothed Eskimos
and their crescent-lidded boys stropping whale bone knives
while drying seal skins by the light.

Later, mom and dad turn beneath the quilt,
hold quiet while close by their children sleep,
their faces and hands rough, bodies soft as seal skin,
slippery as otters.

Outside, twenty sled dogs huddle, ears cocked
to the faint chop of a single-engine Piper Cub flying
low and toward the moon.

Under the bare cherry trees something still
and ageless seeps up into the bones-
frozen earth, echo of near firesides,
slow breathing of the season.

The Herbalist 

Next life, I'll devote to the earnest pursuit of languor. 
A dubious sort, I'll live like a Buddha, impervious, fat. 
What a relief to flout unknowable accounts-
let the earth offer up its sober charities if it wants. 
Moses strikes the rock and brings forth the bubbling stream. 
We get to swim in it, lie down in it, do what we want.
Want.  The thing unfurls like tight-packed knots 
of fiddlehead fern, mandrakes, gentian, garden spurge, 
opening large upon themselves, stopless, filling the sky. 
Let whatever we find turn to seeds, jackbeans, stalks 
uplifted, rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind while years lock
into years, and contentment fills the mouth. 

Thé Dansant

See her down there? Our planet as a child-
red, eruptive, difficult, Jurassic, lost.
At Olduvai Gorge, a flat-headed chunk of skull gathers
in its furrows the fetid air, one millennium into another. 
Near Lake Turkana, the twelve-year-old who went for water 
two million years ago-whose narrow brow still lards the plain.
Jaw fragments, leg and hand bones.  A scattering 
of hackberry seeds.  Teeth. Those, too. 
It got cold, then colder. You see? 

One night the moon diminished, next the sun. 
Still, we forgive the lightning, promise children light follows night. 
What do we know? It pleases us to think it might. 
Let it be so, as it pleased the kids to dream thele, 
dream thelyblast, dream the lee wash of night itself.
Only an epoch pause, each of us 
a furrowed, hair-matted thing, 
staring at the ice-borne rim just long enough 
to scatter seeds across the melt.

The Color of Cardinals

as the antithesis of snow, as antidote to sand, as allowing for passage 
through a certain kind of incandescence-things disappear-they disappear and with them, conventional itineraries, 
subterranean walls, passion fruit or the unwound string, and better, 
the last half note of your favorite Brandenburg or best, 
the weathered skin of the old men up in the hills, 
what they drink, what they wear around their necks,
(the color of your lips) (the color of theirs) what they think or anyway, 
that pigment in the desert cliffs, up there toward the top and in them, 
nearly visible in the first blush of morning, the stunned red birds.

To Sleep 

"I've given it up," my lover writes
from her new home hard by a canal, beside a bridge. 
As resignation is her job and therefore mine,
she's seen me here, eyewitness, swears 
she's watched one night's consecration, 
the sky starched with infinitives, 
a constellation of minarets, distant, stunted, 
owing its incompletion to the short memory of saints-
because saints must be so possessed, she knows
their names and lineage, their coats of arms-
What saints are these? open, cloaks fluttering 
so to trick the night-that she hears the holy, 
indolent and dreamless, their blessings rise unfeathered
as my own sleep (and therefore hers) seeps past the door.
Give us, critical tithe, a drama, like a scattering of birds 
loosed from the aviary-motiveless, instinctual, 
a flight unmarred by clues, such birds 
as wingbeats bell through cloud, tolling spare and treble-
faint sketches, the briefest knell-
or flowing like water thirsty for stones,
water tasting of sand, and sand, she knows,
that shivering there, Chartres, 19 something, 
buries the night, its earth, its lotus fields.
Even the privileged do not live as we have done.
Sweet angel of a thousand sleepless turns, 
stay awhile, I beg her, (quickly now-
we're running out of servants, out of port)
stay this frayed, moth-eaten night.

Comprimario 

We preserved the beach towels neat, dry, 
the off-shore wind, days unrelenting, 
but the beach plum thrived and the fragrant flowers 
with their fat, red fruit fell in bounty over the dunes 
and sand beside the boardwalk held the wind-carved forms, 
all involuted sun and shade. 

From his villa in Mallorca Chopin wrote, 
"I caught cold in spite of the heat, palms, figs, 
and the three most famous doctors on the island. 
One said I had died, the second, that I am dying, 
the third that I shall die." When one is ready 
to leave the world, even a duet of wooden spoons 
becomes the world. Add a colander or a perfect 
paring knife, the heart could break from intrigue. 

Chopin decided to travel blind. 
What use are maps to someone who knows 
his place does not know him? Let me explain. 
The words "his place does not know him"
so beguiled Chopin that he whispered them 
again and again, his right hand resting 
on the keyboard.  Suddenly illuminated, 
he saw phrases enfold around the broken 
edges of arpeggios, around scales scattered 
like dried sea grass in the tidal pools-
away from the guesthouse with its strings 
and hammers, far from his bedroom 
with its southern light. 

Henrí of Hoboken, an Epic 

Following his much-celebrated debut, Dante at Large, the Poet returns with another enduring hero. This time it's a fifty-year-old Gnostic with a photographic memory. Henrí's intermittently reared by gamblers, thieves, whores and priests in one of Americas's most notorious sin cities. But, he's living as a saint in fifth century Byzantium. 

As in Dante at Large, the Poet's new epic describes the labyrinthine terrain in which we shape our identities and search for meaning. And like Dante, mid-life Henrí places his questions into a distant and possibly wiser world. For some reason, the stories of ancient Byzantium help Henrí make sense of his absurd-and often dangerous-existence. Henrí of Hoboken is an ironic, funny, and heart-rending account of the ways we become our own saviors by choosing what to believe.

Praise for Dante at Large

". . . . a charming, unexpectedly poignant first epic." -The Willamette Picayune

"Dante at Large is a work of art that struts its way on to the bookshelf . . ."    -Clearwater Beacon

". . . a modestly entertaining poem." -The New Jersey Post Book World.

Excerpts from Henrí-

Henrí went to bed and lay down. He tried to forget himself and Byzantium and Hoboken. To forget everything, but he couldn't. He went to the window and challenged the darkness. He knew this was a cliche. He didn't care anymore.

His angel said, those who come to know themselves enjoy their possessions. Henrí asked the angel what happened if you had nothing to possess, his face pressed to the glass, trying to see the empty fields below.

The angel said then the light will descend upon you and you will be clothed in it. The angel spoke like this.

Henrí tried to imagine being clothed in light, but he couldn't. He was disappointed. It was like that sometimes. He would go instead to the mountains of New Hampshire, start there. He would take a new lover. They'd walk. It would be many days. They'd hold each other's faces with both hands. They'd throw away their clothes, see what happened in the light. Or swim to Byzantium. Lay off the angel. Lay down in the ivory sand.

Punkawallahs

What a surly coddled clot of insolent self-aggrandizers. And madmen. That too. 

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel especially, that apocalyptic whiz kid brigand. Hawkers, rickshaw pullers, punkawallahs, boat-builders all. 

Do you think I watch you only when you pray, turn away when you toss your worthless coins in your pagan fountains? Maybe I'm up there sunning myself on the moons of Uranus, equatorial Oberon, the southern coast of Umbriel. 

So, my prophets, my loves, you must never say the world bears my sacrifice, nor tell a soul the Earth's eye's gone indiscreet, knees more quaked. 

Say instead, the edges of the world blur to silhouette, even as you wait beside the window, having finished with your garden, each globe of fruit on its slender stalk. You cannot move even as the city lightens, the sky clear as nitrogen, brittle as toast.

Expulsion

Fact is, she was mad with boredom. 
Adam, too, though less so. You know how it is with men. 
He could have stayed longer, a few years anyway, but still, 
he found himself imagining Eve with clothes, 
maybe some lingerie or a black dress, and too, 
he wondered how the lamb might taste slow roasted on a spit 
over a rhododendron fire, basted with red wine, 
and he had no red wine.  None.  And Eve. 

Well. There was the brook just beyond the Garden. 
She could hear it. It sang to her close up like the willow ptarmigan, 
it lowed from far away like the caribou. 
She wanted to bathe in it, had to, though in truth, 
water enough flowed through the Garden, some below ground, 
like the caves of the Baja, and some above, 
catching in deep pools where it teased Eve with her reflection 
and the reflection of distant clouds. It was there she named so much she was denied, 
though she knew denial to be a cavil. 
Who would not want to see loons and Greenland parrots, 
puffins and Mother Carey's chickens, Leach's storm-petrels, 
black guillemots, an Arctic sky suffused with swallows? 
And what about the bottomless Norwegian sun, 
the northern people: Yup'ik and Inupiat? 

What of them? Given time, even something vast appeals, 
even something barren. 

Night Bird Beneath Yellow Moon in Fog with Possibility

Adam grabs the fogged-in yellow moon, pockets it, large, some spruce, larger, brushed blue with blue needles, short and blunt, he figures with a wry grin, why, there's Goth enough here (forgot the fire) to last the night, but not 

enough to make up what he's missing nor enough to make the missing right, as the night bird, hear her? figures what to eat, so there's an edge, which is nice. 

The clock is blind, so that's nicer. 
These are the years whose possibilities he makes up as he goes along. Were it possible, at any moment he might cry out. He has thought about it. He has determined to excise the conditional -so what possibly then? The red wine chills too fast under the yellow moon by the ocean in the fog. There's that. 

Look at his face, his hands, the lines in them. More sky than usual up there above the fog tonight. Here, there is no light- none from the house, none from the street, long way off through the reeds and brambles and cattails and on it, no cars, and in them, no people, they are tending their own fires or they are asleep. 

Only one stands so still you would think him not real, if thinking so did not require the conditional there at the ocean's edge-but look down there, beneath the night bird. 

Look down there.

Jeffrey Levine was a corporate lawyer in New York City and a professional musician when he made the move that changed his life. He was playing  clarinet in a chamber music concert at Bennington College in Vermont when, during an intermission, he found the library, and sat down to compose a poem. In 1999, Levine joined his sister-in-law, Margaret Donovan, to launch Tupelo Press, a small publishing house in Dorset, Vermont. He is now a teacher of English and writing at Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Connecticut. Levine resides in West Hartford.
Levine is a graduate of the University of Albany, State University of New York, where he majored in music and English. He then taught at Skidmore College, played with the Albany Symphony Orchestra and became a member of the Buffalo Philharmonic. He attended the Buffalo School of Law (State University of New York) and worked briefly as a criminal defense lawyer. He went on to spend 25 years in corporate law while continuing his work as a musician.
Levine's poetry has appeared in various literary journals and he is the author of Mortal, Everlasting (Pavement Saw Press, 2002), a collection of poetry, with a second collection, Rumor of Cortez forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2005.
"Elegy in Istanbul," and "Finger Painting" were first published in Barrow Street. "The Misunderstanders" first appeared in 5 AM. "Liturgy" was first published in Beloit Poetry Journal, "Andes" in Alembic. "Vincent's Auction" and "The Turning" first appeared in Notre Dame Review and Yankee Magazine, respectively. Each of these poems also appear in Levine's Mortal Everlasting (Pavement Saw Press, 2002). "The Herbalist," "Thé Dansant," "The Color of Cardinals," "To Sleep," "Comprimario," "Henrí of Hoboken, an Epic," "Punkawallahs,"  "Expulsion," and "Night Bird Beneath Yellow Moon in Fog with Possibility" are drawn from Rumor of Cortez, a manuscript forthcoming from Red Hen Press. "The Herbalist" and "Comprimario" first appeared in Notre Dame Review ("Comprimario" also appeared in The Journal), "Thé Dansant" in New Orleans Review, "The Color of Cardinals" and "Punkawallahs" in thedrunkenboat.com, "To Sleep" in 3rd Bed, "Expulsion" in Three Candles.