This conversation took place in Philip Levine's home near the Tufts University campus where he teaches each autumn. During the winter and summer months, he and his wife Frances live in Fresno, California, although in the winter of 1985 Philip Levine will be a visiting professor at Brown University. Levine's Selected Poems was published in…
Water angels, I wrongly thought them, orotund in blue tinseled light. And water is right, the reedy stems taint at first frost with the bronze of monumental fountains. But the factual angel is a vessel or basin, the antique catchment, the Cytherean scallop shell that bore the halts and plunges of its fleshly passenger across…
November 9, 1981 Late Monday afternoon It is not yet 5 p.m. now and already near to completely dark, just the sky is still that deep dark blue just before it becomes black. Much to write about, though I have been avoiding sitting down here. What first? The good news or the bad? Last Tuesday…
A solitary apartment house, the last one before the boulevard ends and a bricked road winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor through the dusty windows Karen beholds the elegant couples walking arm in arm in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, and she is waiting for a particular young…
The yarn pulled diagonally over neighboring threads in time might equal the sheen on a bird's feather, a flower petal's tip, or some corner of sky. As far back as I remember, she was never without some neutral canvas, rectangle, circle, square, her hands having chosen the continental, basket-weave, or half-stitch. I watched to see…
A group of us were sitting around trying to think of nice things to say about my grandfather. He had died at ten o'clock that morning. So there we all were, gathered in my parents' living room. There was my mother, of course, She was Grandpa Jack's eldest child. And my father. And my mother's…
Before I could tell time, I'd sit and wait For the cuckoo in my mother's wooden clock To open his red door, and sing “cuckoo.” I never knew how many times he'd sing, But the song was regular, and a long trill Gave me a chance to look inside his house Where it was dark…
Low tide along this oceanfront there are the usual chipped conchs, angel wings, atlantic augers spiraling to pintips, and occasionally, beyond the sea wrack or tangled in it, a perfect starfish. Rainbowed donax burrow at the water's edge, moving beneath the surface like slippers. Some escape the sandpipers which scatter when we head south toward…
On a spring day in 1945, not long before his 12th birthday, Bud Gardner headed out to plow his father's fields. His younger brother Gilbert came along for the ride. Sandy, the boys' sister, lingered within earshot. Gilbert climbed on the cultpacker, a two ton machine which, towed in the tractor's wake, crushed the freshly…
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