From “Linnets” by Larry Levis
This is a good page.
It is blank,
and getting blanker.
My mother and father
are falling asleep over it.
My brother is finishing a cigarette;
he looks at the blank moon.
My sisters walk gravely in circles.
My wife sees through it, through blankness.
My friends stop laughing, they listen
to the wind in a room in Fresno, to the wind
of this page, which is theirs,
which is blank.
They are all tired of reading,
they want to go home,
they won’t be saying goodbye.
When they are gone,
the page will be crumpled,
thrown into the street.
Around it, sparrows will be feeding
on bits of garbage.
The linnets will be singing.
A man will awaken on his deathbed,
not yet cured.
I will not have written these words,
I will be that silence slipping around the bend
in the river, where it curves out of sight among weeds,
the silence in which a car backfires and drives away,
and the father of that silence.
a nicely, refreshingly minimal poem – it’s difficult to capture such “nothing” moments, infact most people disgard them and write about discernable events, and “action”, so its brave to write about blankness.
I read somewhere, a quote, “Poetry is about improving on the blank page”, so this calls that to mind, in a very literal way.
thanks for posting this.
Such a great starting line. It should be the inspiration for a new poet’s exercise.
I love the solitary tone of Levis’ work. I like the poems you choose.