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download audioback GREGORY DONOVAN | 19th Annual Levis Prize
Before It Gets Dark
[eds. note: The audio version may contain extemporized material that is not reproduced in the text provided to us for publication.]
If I were to swing a small chain in front of you tonight, as if I were a hypnotist attempting to put all of you under a spell, and if you saw that chain had a small cross dangling on the end of it, and if the cross seemed to have a man grasping onto its crossbar, much as if that man were swinging on a somewhat unlikely trapeze, you would now be seeing the central image of the poem by Larry Levis which I’m going to discuss this evening. The man holding onto the trapeze would be an image of excitement and hope as well as of tragedy and perhaps even comedy. The cross itself is of course a powerful symbol, one never to be taken lightly, and yet for former altar boys raised in the Catholic Church, as Larry Levis and I were—and I believe that group also includes Rickey Laurentiis—the cross can be a symbol that raises mixed feelings, a strong concoction of emotions that might include both awe and resentment, and not only a sense of altruistic idealism and spiritual yearning but also a confrontation with disappointment and a not insignificant dose of suspicion. Perhaps that mixture is always there in association with all such powerful symbols, whether it’s an American flag pin on someone’s lapel, or it’s a silver cross hanging around someone’s neck. That flag pin and that silver cross may be symbols of strength and loyalty and affirmation, or they can become symbols of oppression and false advertising and abuse of power, and so they may well be objects suitable for wary, cautious responses—or even suitable for mockery—depending on who is wearing them and why.
The poem by Larry Levis, “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It,” provides the title for the posthumous volume of Levis poems edited by his good friend David St. John, a new collection which has now entered the world since the last time I spoke at this annual Levis Reading Prize celebration. There are many reasons why this poem makes a great title poem and contributes as well to the book’s strong title: The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems. Part of it has to do with that image of a trapeze growing dark—as if the circus is closing down, or perhaps the trapeze artist has fallen and the spotlight has been turned off—and part has to do with one of the statements appearing in the poem: “It marked the end of things.”
In fact, the poem begins with an image of frustration, entanglement, and stasis—a cart wheel stuck in mud—and it describes two loud-mouthed sexist braggarts in a tavern who are drinking tsuica together (that’s a kind of Romanian plum brandy or moonshine), and the two are boastfully recalling “their one / Accomplishment in life—the seduction of a virgin” beneath the now-empty pedestal where a statue of the mad-dog dictator Joseph Stalin had once stood. (The poem’s beginning certainly puts one in mind of another pair of sexist braggarts caught on videotape on a bus who are currently in our national news.) Thus, the poem begins with a sadly depressing proof that “The State is an old man’s withered arm”—a portrayal of a nation deflated, weakened, and without energy.
The poem turns from the removed and discarded statue of Stalin to Karl Marx, who, the poem tells us, is “the only surviving son of Jesus Christ,” establishing a relationship between Marx and Jesus which is further emphasized by the image presented of that last letter in the name Marx, that “x,” which the poem shows us as resembling “an overturned cross / On a windswept hillside.” Marx, the poem suggests, announced the end of something (presumably industrialized capitalism) yet the poem also points out an irony: “The trouble with a good idea is that it has to work,” and Marx, the poem further suggests, has now become only marginally relevant. Both Christ and Marx are seen as figures who remind us of unrealized possibilities and hopes that have not been achieved, that have come to an endpoint of enervation and failure. Christ is figuratively presented as a hapless acrobat waiting for a trapeze to come to him, but the “empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him / Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became // A darkening trapeze.”
The conceptual foundation of this poem by Levis is clearly a kind of echo of the famous poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” a poem written in 1919 at a historical moment similar to our own, as one century turned fully into another, and whose underlying conceptual framework is also highly appropriate to our troubled present, since Yeats is also writing about an historical moment that marked the end of something. Yeats is writing about the oncoming end of a two-thousand-year cycle, a moment in the great cycle of spiritual and cultural changes when one dispensation—say, the domination of Christianity in Western civilization—is coming to an end and a new dispensation, something unpredictable and quite dangerous, is coming into being, a “rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.”
The Levis poem does not simply end on a note of despairing resignation, however, even though it does offer a portrait of economic and political injustice and chaos as it describes the men Levis worked with in the vineyards of central California, men “who were paid / In wages thin as water, cash that evaporated & rose like heat.” In addition, we encounter a bruja, a soothsayer or palm reader in the migrant workers’ camp who sadly cannot predict anything because her only answer to questions is to weep, and finally we have the sketch of a woman (presumably the same woman) who is overcome by “remembering her diminishment & pain” from her time working in “the grinding shed” where her health was destroyed by inhaling steel filings. Yet the poem, in its last moment, balances the idea that “it is too late to change things now” with the possibility that “it isn’t.” That may be the very idea that is referred to at the beginning of the poem, the idea of a possible transformation or revolution that was stuck in the mud, unable to progress, but by the end, though there is no simplistic solution or triumph in the poem, there is an affirmation of possibility.
In fact, we have the example of the entire poem itself, which in its ability to look carefully at people and at ideas that are being so coldly pushed aside, nevertheless at the same time enacts a generosity and concern that may be, in itself, the basis of all hope and change. Even if “Fact is disbelief,” and death inevitably comes for us all, it is still a possibility that it is not “too late to change things now.” It may be possible to take one more ride on the big waves off the famous San Onofre surfing beach in California, even if only in imagination, just as it may be possible to take one last swing on that darkening trapeze.
And with that introduction in mind, here is Larry Levis’s poem, “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It.”
Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It
The idea turned out to be no more than a cart wheel
Stuck in mud, & unturned fields spreading to the horizon while
Two guys in a tavern went on drinking tsuica & recalling their one
Accomplishment in life—the seduction of a virgin on the blank
Pedestal of a statue where Stalin had once stood.
The State is an old man’s withered arm.
~
The only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx.
You can tell by the last letter of his name,
Which has the shape & frail balance of an overturned cross
On a windswept hillside. It marked the end of things.
Of lumber that rots & falls. The czar is a shattered teacup,
The trouble with a good idea is that it has to work:
The only surviving son of Jesus Christ survives now
Mostly in English departments & untended graves.
One thing he said I still remember, a thing that’s never there
When I try to look it up, was: “Sex should be no more important . . .
Than a glass of water.” It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing
Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.
The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him
Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became
A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves.
~
My colleague Otto Fick, who twenty years ago
Wrote brilliant lectures on the air, sometimes
Would pause & seem to consult notes left
On a podium, & then resume. A student once
Went up after class to look at them & found
Only a blank sheet of paper. Nothing there.
“In theory, I believe in Marx. In fact, my wife
Has to go in next week for another
Biopsy. Fact is disbelief. One day it swells up
In front of you, the sky, the sunlight on everything,
Traffic, kids on surfboards waiting for the next
Big set off San Onofre. It’s all still there . . . just
There for someone else, not for you.” This is what
My friend Otto told me as we drove to work.
~
I worked with men in vineyards once who were paid
In wages thin as water, cash that evaporated & rose like heat.
They lived in rows of makeshift sheds the owner hauled
Into an orchard too old to bother picking anymore,
And where, at dusk, a visible rushing hunger
Raced along the limbs of the trees surrounding them.
Their kids would watch it happen until a whole tree would seem
To vanish under it. There were so many of them.
By then the rats were flying over a sickening trapeze of leaves
And the tree would darken suddenly. It would look like brown water
Rushing silently & spreading everywhere
Before it got dark anyway & the kids went in.
“There was more rats in there than there was beads on all the rosaries of the dead.
We wen’ to confession all the time then ’cause we thought we might disappear
Under them trees. There was a bruja in the camp but we dint go to her no more.
She couldn’t predict nothing. And she’d always cry when you asked her questions,”
A woman said who had stayed there for a while.
Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:
Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way
Her scuffed shoes looked in the pale light,
How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed
For thirty years without complaining once about it,
How she might have done things differently. But didn’t.
How it is too late to change things now. How it isn’t. 
Gregory Donovan, a senior editor of Blackbird, is the author of the poetry collection Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press, 1993), a collection that won the Devins Award for Poetry. With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he is a producer of A Late Style of Fire, a feature-length documentary on the life and work of Larry Levis. Donovan is a faculty member in Virginia Commonwealth University’s graduate creative writing program. His commentary on the work of Larry Levis is an annual feature at the Levis Prize event.