Philip Levine "It goes on"

Continuing with the associative link we are now on Philip Levine, a great American poet. He turned 80 this year. His poetry comes out of his life: close acquaintance with the hard lot of the working poor. It is also tinged with an awareness of the bleakness of life coupled with, from the larger perspective – its beauty. He captures the drudgery but puts joy into stubborn daily continuation. The lyric beauty of life sings through the mouths of the overworked and underpaid. It is a Sisyphusian struggle and the joy emerges from never stopping. Robert Frost summed up everything that he learned of life life this way: “it goes on.” Philip Levine's poetry resonates with the joy of tenancity.

From "Milkweed"

. . . the windows
went dark first with rain
and then snow, and then the days,
then the years ran together and not
one mattered more than
another, and not one mattered.

Two days ago I walked
the empty woods, bent over,
crunching through oak leaves,
asking myself questions
without answers. From somewhere
a froth of seeds drifted by touched
with gold in the last light
of a lost day, going with
the wind as they always did.

From “A Sleepless Night Analysis”
. . .
An iron day,
I think, yet it will come
dazzling, the light
rise from the belly of leaves and pour
burning from the cups
of poppies.
The mockingbird squawks
from his perch, fidgets,
and settles back. The snail, awake
for good, trembles from his shell
and sets sail for China. My hand dances
in the memory of a million vanished stars.

A man has every place to lay his head.

From “Red Dust”

. . .
I do not believe in sorrow;
it is not American.
At 8,000 feet the towns
of this blond valley smoke
like the thin pipes of the Chinese,
and I go higher where the air
is clean, thin, and the underside
of light is clearer than the light.
Above the tree line the pines
crowd below like moments of the past
and on above the snow line
the cold underside of my arm,
the half in shadow, sweats with fear
as though it lay along the edge
of revelation.