Two Poems
Levine, Philip
CENTRAL RAILWAY, SYDNEY In a shit-house stall in Central I saw the one word "Mum" and thought once more of young men torn by want or war or hunger from their families, the West Virginian I...
...The machines were starting up, the grinders and polishers, even the time-clock had loosed its tongue and was babbling in our heads: 8:30, and then 8:31, and then . . . midnight, when I stood, chilled and alone, under the winking stars, a man breathing October in the wind while the houses slowly closed their eyes and the leafless elms whispered a name I could devour...
...When the buzzer jarred me awake, she stood up awkwardly, and then with her right arm reached down to help me...
...What came back from the Somme or El Alemain...
...76 • DISSENT BEAUTY IS BUT A FLOWER When she put her slender arm next to mine I saw the veins that climbed from her tight fist leap a moment and then still...
...I sit here helpless, remembering Pedro Illic's tale of his grandfather alone crossing an ocean and two continents to give what was left of his life to the nitrate mines of Chile or my own father fleeing the wars of Tsarist Russia and sent to the high adventures of England...
...I closed my eyes...
...CENTRAL RAILWAY, SYDNEY In a shit-house stall in Central I saw the one word "Mum" and thought once more of young men torn by want or war or hunger from their families, the West Virginian I wrote of thirty years ago and knew fifteen years before that who broke down and cried and made us cry to hear him...
...Her name was Alma Savage, she was then twenty-seven, up from West Virginia less than a life, and we worked swing shift plating plumbing parts five nights a week going on our second year and at last we shared our names...
...So I have come full circle in every way...
...So I told her mine It was then she thrust her arm out, her left, then I my right, and for a frozen moment we were brother and sister or maybe something I had no name for...
...Nothing that can touch and hurt like this one simple word a boy far from home and getting farther carved with a key he'd never use again because he knew something must be said and said now, and he couldn't think of whom to speak to, of who would listen, or a single other word that would do...
...A torn photograph, a missing place at dinner which dimmed and finally vanished over the years...
...The smells were bread, whole-wheat bread, milk, apples, cigarette smoke, and her sweat as strong as mine but sweeter...
...Europe too went on to fade at last, still with her grinning queens and princes good at horsemanship, her armies of the republic that might turn out for parades, and all those overwrought statues to the past and fountains wasting water...
...FALL • 1996 • 77...
...Seated side by side, legs stretched out before us, our backs against a stack of pallets, she'd turned and said, "Alma, my name is Alma Savage...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
