In our chaotic moment, one aspect of our situation is actually the same as it ever was—it has always been, and always will be, difficult to find a person with a spine. That metaphorical expression not only refers to a person of exceptional courage, but often it especially applies to someone willing to stand up against the actions and the lies of those in power. We might feel that our condition is not unlike that of Diogenes, the ancient Greek cynic philosopher, who, it was said, would famously walk the streets of Athens in broad daylight carrying a lighted lamp, stating that he was wandering about trying to find an honest man. And so we look around ourselves seeking to find a person with a spine who can show us that such courage is still possible, a person who might inspire us to have a spine ourselves. Yet that’s rarely a simple decision—it’s often not a choice to be made in a completely selfish way. When we see that those who stand up with a spine are very often punished—perhaps with the loss of a job, being jailed, or even being deported, or still worse, being shot dead—then what if, in your situation, you feel responsible for the welfare of another, perhaps for a spouse, or a child, or even a cat, or an octopus, or a penguin? What then? Meanwhile, the chaos and lies continue to swirl. It’s a dangerous dark time, and we wonder how to keep ourselves sane and whole and decent, and how to keep Diogenes’s lamp lit, if not out in the street, at least within our inner selves. 

These days, as I’ve been busy with teaching during my final semester working as a university professor, I’ve been telling my students that it is possible for us to take refuge in poetry, in reading it and writing it, looking to its intelligence and artful imagination, as well as its potential for sardonic humor, as a way to light up our interior Diogenes lamp, if only to shine its searchlight on ourselves. While poetry cannot directly save our environment, our society, or our democracy, it may keep our vision clear and our spirit strong. Like Auden, I know that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but it survives, a way of being. It is a mouth that speaks up and speaks out. Poetry can offer a way of seeing vividly, a pathway through the same “Doors of Perception” through which both Aldous Huxley and William Blake walked without fear. 

And so it was that as I looked through the powerful new volume of the collected poems of Larry Levis in the forthcoming book Swirl & Vortex—whose upcoming publication we will be celebrating here with a VCU event next year—I happened upon his poem “Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings.” It’s a poem full-blown with an atmosphere of irony, rebellion, sarcasm, dark humor, absurdity, and lightly veiled anger directed at the experience of getting arrested and, more generally, toward the workings of the law in our lives, which for the most part Levis treats with deep suspicion, absurdist reinvention, and a tricky attitude of resistance. Levis, like most “lefties” of his time (including me), had no great admiration for the State (capital “S”) or its insidious practices of oppression, and in this poem he finds ways to lampoon that oppression, often by turning it on its head.

When he was college-aged, Larry’s run-ins with the law were distinctly unpleasant, mostly having to do with political demonstrations or, more broadly, just having long hair and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Later in life, those experiences contributed to his being both kind and generous to the various “jailbirds” he met in his Church Hill neighborhood, often loaning them money he didn’t have, or giving them jobs around his house that he didn’t need done, to help them out after they’d gotten out of jail one more time again—and he wrote about those people with empathy and honesty, delving into their inner lives in ways that affirmed their undeniable, if broken, humanity. Those attitudes and approaches stand behind the poem’s sardonic humor mixed with barely restrained anger and subtly complicated mockery toward enforcements of the law. 

But in “Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings,” Levis goes beyond that, entering the kingdom of the imagination where he liked to live and breathe. He imagines a new kind of law, one which everyone would want to disobey, a law which doesn’t have to wait long for someone to break it, a law which would cause everyone to discover they “have a spine with a memory of wings,” a deep memory that can allow “the truant boy,” when the “bracelets of another school of love / Are fastened to his wrists”—a dark school of love to be sure—to find that he may already be equipped with a sense of flight, and his jail time can be a time for reading and learning and renewal. 

This new law, magically, would allow the spine of the truant, the judge, and even the arresting officer to begin to remember that the spine once could fly—allowing everyone to recall that they had perhaps once been a bird or even an angel or possibly a demon—the best sort of troublemaking demon—or perhaps the spine might remember that it is descended from something amazing and possibly prehistoric, something unstoppable and powerful, something that might strangely diminish the effect of arrests and institutional incarcerations of all kinds, recalling something unexpected, perhaps something like a dinosaur ancestor with great big teeth and enormous wings, something impossibly capable of high, long, soaring flights. . . 

And after that flight of magic realism—let’s enjoy this genuinely magical poem by Larry Levis: 

Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings 

So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.

So that in jail he will have the time to read
How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode
The king’s wrist died of a common cold,
And learn that chivalry persists,
And what first felt like an insult to the flesh
Was the blank ‘o’ of love.
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.

So that no empty court will make a  judge recall
Ice fishing on some overcast bay,
Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought
To be an interesting law,
The kind of thing that no one can obey,
A law that whispers “Break me.”
Let the crows roost & caw.
A good judge is an example to us all.

So that the patrolman can still whistle
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth
And even show some faint gesture of respect
While he cuffs the suspect,
Not ungently, & says things like ok,
That’s it, relax,
It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist,
Lean back just a little, against me.