Philip Levine: "Gospel"

in tribute
Philip Levine
1928-2015











The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there's
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don't
ask myself what I'm looking for.
I didn't come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I've said to myself,
although it greets me with last year's
dead thistles and this year's
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider's cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I've never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. "Soughing" we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

"Gospel" by Philip Levine. Text as published in Breath: Poems (Knopf, 2006).

Curator's note: Philip Levine—one of our mindfulness poets, voice of the working class, and one-time Poet Laureate of the U.S.—died this week at the age of 87. Here are two quotes for us to remember him by. First, "Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything." And, "I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity."