Salt for the Spirit

...Their cries remain engraved in his poems: I heard the lostvoices of creation running over stones as the last darbiess sifted upward, voices saddened bv the milky residue of machine shops and spangled with first light, discordant, harsh, but voices nonetheless...

...Planting seeds sent by a friend recently deceased, Levine notices "the bowed heads of onions" mourning with him...

...Others celebrate bebop musicians, including Bud Powell, Clifford Brown and Max Roach, as well as jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington...

...Go then, ? my inseparable, this once more...

...Hence Levine's constant attention in these poems to grinding factory work under unsafe conditions, suicides, young men who perished in unnecessary wars, prisoners in labor camps, and jazz musicians who made stirring music while ravaging their lives with drugs...

...Justice once intended to become a musician, and studied with the American composer Carl Ruggles before ultimately deciding to write...

...The Lesson" affirms the necessity of accurate memory—the only means of preserving those who have gone before...

...The world is very dusty, uncle...

...One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good...

...Our failures and tragedies—as individuals or as a society—must be remembered as well as cleansed, but never denied...

...Justice grew up in Miami and graduated from the University of Miami...

...Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises, Shudder and droop...

...His sharp eye spots something significant wherever he looks: in the cardboard boxes littering the banks of the Hudson River, the smokestacks signaling over Detroit, the wisteria and almond trees bursting into bloom in his yard in southern California...

...But one of the wonders of Levine's work is that while his subjects seldom change, he has minednew perspectives, more profound depths...

...On a wellworn mouth organ he pipes ditties in a minor key that recall lives now distilled into pure melody...

...The salt of Philip Levine 's poetry never loses its savor...

...And home might be some town we passed— The gingerbread of porches scrolled In shadow down the white housefronts...

...Cinema and Ballad of the Great Depression" recounts the lives of jobless men mocked by the vestiges of a more prosperous world as they wander from place to place in search of employment...

...Although he has lived in California for much of his adult life, he has never lost sight of his youth in Detroit, where he earned a living on the assembly lines along with most of the men of his generation...

...From these Spanish-language surrealists Levine learned to transform the ordinary into something rich and strange...

...It is no surprise that Justice relishes the spare photographs of Walker Evans, testaments to the dignity of people battered by poverty and stooped from labor...

...These intrepid rodents evoke a twinge of sympathy in him because they are part of the inscrutable plan of Creation...

...These include memories of sitting outside on porches in the South at sunset, of childhood piano teachers, of decaying cityscapes or rural communities glimpsed from the window of a train, and of the myth of Orpheus...

...You know their voices now, Faintly the martyred peaches crying out Your name, the name nobody knows but you...

...But, "having so much to look forward to he looked back," thus losing her a second time...

...An admirer of the anarchists who staged a doomed resistance against General Francisco Franco's Falangists in the Spanish Civil War, Levine further examines their martyrdoms...

...There is an obvious satirical quality to portraying rats as a congregation doing the Lord's work, but Levine has serious intentions here as well...

...He sees our separate stories as "salt for the spirit...

...Though Levine's subjects are sometimes as dark as the horrifying etchings of Francisco de Goya, at the same time Breath consistently bears witness to all the blessings that make up the pattern of human existence...

...Like the mournful wail of a harmonica, the nameless narrator sings his story not as ajournai of personal experiences, but in brief scenes that register with his weary spirit: Agriculture embraced Industty...

...Justice inquires in "Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens...

...For him, poetry's melodies stem from our regrets and mistakes and such songs outlast toil and misery...

...Let us work...

...In "'There is a golden light in certain old paintings,'" Justice writes: I say the song went this way: ? prolong Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong...

...A decade hence, a war away...

...As the poet wryly observes, our nation is "half in love with failure...

...Many of the poems in his 20th collection, Breath (Knopf, 94pp., $23.00), mourn friends who have died...

...All these people, and many more, have taught him to offer gritty benedictions and thanksgivings for circumstances that most would consider a curse...

...Meanwhile we camped out underneath Great smiles on billboards fading...

...The poet admires Orpheus not merely because he is a bard chanting his poetry to music, but because Justice conceives of him as the ultimate symbol of nostalgia...

...someone will play the guitar...

...Mammothly, on public walls...

...When you look back they've gone into water or air, they've joined the falling rain that makes vision so difficult even for the visionary...

...As "Cinema" suggests, Justice is intrigued with prosody...

...The poor and marginalized are accustomed to being overlooked in the same way city dwellers ignore the haze of pollution, the clamor of traffic and other undesirable elements of urban existence...

...I picture this reimagined Orpheus dressed not in the traditional diaphanous Greek tunic, but in an old-fashioned suit and homburg hat, sitting on a wooden porch, or perhaps the bench on the platform at some small-town train station...

...Occasionally he dazzles us with his dexterity in complex metrical forms—the sestina, the villanelle, the sonnet, and the pantoum...

...Part of Levine's great gift is his ability to articulate the "lost voices of creation," to bring the forgotten into our field of vision, and to make us understand that, in the words of Emerson, they too "are all poets and mystics...

...Things will go better one day, boys...

...Actually, his own poems—lush with philosophical musings and hints of masochism against the backdrop of Southern sunsets—often recall the music of Stevens: Now comes the evening of the mind...

...Levine's tribute to Yenkl is a private kaddish for a man who revered the world around him and was the first to teach his great-nephew to pray: Today I'd walk the fields in the winter chill if the fields were still here and not the dull miles of suburban houses...

...More often, though, Justice toys with form, teasing our expectations with half-rhymes and parodies of the baroque, classical and romantic traditions...

...Afterwards we will take thought for our good name...

...May the rainfall on the little graveyard where he now lies in an unmarked grave in thejudean hills, may it pool on the hard yellow clay so unheard music can rise and descend, may the earth hear and rejoice in his gifts, the bounty of one who took what was given, may it bless him in the language of the wind...

...The waning of sunlight and the faint melody of a child practicing the piano create the melancholy, reflective mood of this poet's interior landscape, past and present...

...Don't ask when...

...meet me at the Red Star Mission then...

...And still these threats to have off as before...

...And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed...

...Levine is now in his 70s, and Breath contains a number of elegies for departed contemporaries—always different from bereavement for younger friends or those of older generations...

...The Good Gray Poet's expansive nature—"I am large...

...he connects this to the many forms of jazz that combine lament and rebellion...

...Loss of those we love often breaks us up, yet that can in turn loosen blocked feelings we despaired of experiencing: "Again, the dead have found/ a way into the hearts we swore were stone...

...Justice's verse returns to certain motifs that weave his oeuvre together in the manner of the repeated musical phrases that unify symphonies and operas...

...While Americans pour over bright self-help manuals, our literature makes heroes of down-and-outers or the ones who had it all but lost it...

...Like another of his poetic mentors, John Crowe Ransom, Justice delights in ironic reworkings of traditional tropes...

...Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood...

...Who borrows your French words and postures now...

...The intimate tone of address, together with the use of iambic pentameter, link this to a long line of poems addressed by the writer to his heart, spanning from Sir Philip Sydney's elegant, love-struck 16th-century sonnets through William Butler Yeats' modernist rants against the "lust and rage" of an elderly body...

...In the lyric retelling of such stories, these poems turn misery into a triumph of human compassion...

...Levine's American mentor has always been Walt Whitman...

...Collected Poems (Knopf, 304 pp., $25.00) reprints work from his first collection, The Summer Anniversaries (1960), through six subsequent volumes and includes some pieces done since his previous selection, published in 1995...

...Besides poetry, he authored opera libretti, essays and short stories...

...The balmy Florida landscape fringed with palms, spangled with pink and turquoise houses, and illuminated by a "gardenia moon," recurs in his work, held up as a talisman for childhood...

...But today he is more apt to mourn: "How weightless/ words are when nothing will do...

...Following their techniques, he sometimes gives mundane objects—tables or toilets—the ability to speak...

...He limns the city— from its glamorous, airy beachside hotels, where movie stars and businessmen (including Stevens) once came to escape the Northern winters, to its trashy present...

...The orchard will bloom...

...Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good...

...I contain multitudes"—encompassed the vastness of an American landscape populated by wave after wave of immigrants from all over the world...

...When he braved the underworld to fetch back his bride, Eurydice, he was told he could take her back to earth so long as he never glanced at her following behind him during the return journey...

...Levine's work never approaches Whitman's epic scale, but he does remind his readers how varied a people we are...

...One of his more frequently reprinted lyrics, "The Telephone Number of the Muse," describes that fickle lady putting off an erstwhile squeeze with the unconvincing excuses of someone in the process of taking a new lover...

...From thee, who wouldst lose thyself in the next street...

...Justice's satiric instinct further imagines a postmodern Narcissus who, instead of falling in love with his own good looks, becomes enraptured by his ugliness...

...On Poetry Salt for the Spirit By Phoebe Pettingell The daily struggles of working-class men and women who forge hopeful lives out of bleak circumstances remain the focus of the prolific Philip Levine...

...Heart" delineates the unseemly crushes and longings of middle age as the mature adult rebukes the organ for its adolescent urges: And still I hear thee, beating thy little fist Against the walls...

...Here is the shadow moving down the page Where you sit reading by the garden wall...

...Poured on wounds, salt produces a scar, a permanent mark of the injury, yet it is an antiseptic too, preventing infection and festering that might destroy the body...

...Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song/ in my own breath," he proclaims in "Call it Music," his tribute to Charlie "Bird" Parker...

...And town boys playing baseball in a wad...

...He also recalls his own Russian Jewish ancestors, particularly his great-uncle Yenkl, who spent 30 years as a prisoner in Siberia, escaped to the United States, and worked as a supermarket stock boy until he earned enough money to rejoin his family in Israel...

...The defiant outbursts of his youth have dwindled to an occasional flicker, though his fierceness blazes once more in poems like "Our Reds," a recollection of "that hideous innocence" of three revolutionary comrades from his college days...

...My dear, have I not led thee, Dawn after streaky dawn, besotted, home...

...Soon the headlights come on, singly or in pairs, the rain gleams through the taut cables, no moon rises above the island where now they are among us, each one doing a morsel of God's work until their small jaws ache from so much prayer...

...Those men and women have largely gone unheard during their toil because the more fortunate members of society tune them out like background noise...

...In "Houses in Order," a poem about the rats living under the Williamsburg Bridge, Levine looks at creatures that for most symbolize squalor and decay, and understands their incessant gnawing as "parables to do with" the savor of salt, the im steries of mustard seeds, meat, bones, loaves, and fishes...

...Levine's work is also influenced by Antonio Machado and Federico Garcia Lorca, not to mention Pablo Neruda...

...So much death makes him more conscious of breathing and of the relationship between respiration and singing...

...Donald Justice, who died on August 6, was a classmate of Levine's at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1954, when John Berryman briefly taught several gifted young poets who continue to enrich our literature...