POETRY’S WILL TO DARKNESS: LARRY LEVIS, “TO A WALL OF FLAME IN A STEEL MILL”

[Photo: Peyton Chung]

To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969

Except under the cool shadows of pines,
The snow is already thawing
Along this road . . .
Such sun, and wind.
I think my father longed to disappear
While driving through this place once,
In 1957.
Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress
While his thoughts moved like the shadow
Of a cloud over houses,
And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,
By his desire to be grass,
And simplified.
Was it brought on
By the road, or the snow, or the sky
With nothing in it?
He kept sweating and wiping his face
Until it passed.
And I never knew.

But in the long journey away from my father,

I took only his silences, his indifference

To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.

Now, I can sleep beside this road

If I have to,

Even while the stars pale and go out,

And it is day.

And I can keep secrets for years,

The way a stone retains a warmth from the sun,

It is because men like us

Own nothing, really.

I remember, once,
In the steel mill where I worked,
Someone opened the door of the furnace
And I glanced in at the simple,
Quick and blank erasures the flames made of iron,
Of everything on earth.
It was reverence I felt then, and did not know why,
I do not know even now why my father
Lived out his one life
Farming two hundred acres of gray Málaga vines
And peach trees twisted
By winter. They lived, I think,
Because his hatred of them was entire,
And wordless. I still think of him staring into this road

Twenty years ago,

While his hands gripped the wheel harder,

And his wish to be no one made his body tremble,

Like the touch

Of a woman he could not see,

Her fingers drifting up his spine in silence

Until his loneliness was perfect,

And she let him go –

Her laughter turning into these sheets of black

And glassy ice that dislodge themselves,

And ride slowly out,

Onto the thawing river.

~ Larry Levis, The Dollmaker’s Ghost

**

Recently I wrote: Poetry is the opposite of fear. Perhaps that was why Primo Levi became incredibly excited while reciting, in Auschwitz, the Ulysses Canto from Dante’s Inferno. I am still amazed that poetry can indeed be called the opposite of fear, considering that poetry tends to be so dark (“an unending funeral,” as Billy Collins said).  And this poem, irresistible to me starting with its title, contemplates nothingness, erasure, as a manifestation of the divine ("It was reverence I felt then, I don't know why").

Larry Levis is an ecstatic poet of the dark sort. We won’t find him dancing with the daffodils. But at one point he could be found working in a steel mill in Syracuse, New York. That’s how he supported himself while getting his M.A. in English. That’s how he got to see that annihilating “wall of flame.”

There is a lot of darkness in both fiction and drama, considering the dominance of tragedy in the literary canon (at least as taught in universities). Still, I think poetry is probably the number one genre when it comes to dealing with mortality. There aren't that many “happy poems.” It's almost a given that mortality/transience has to be present in a poem to give it depth. “We kissed briefly in the deathless spring,” D.A. Powell writes, and we admire the oxymoronic nature of that statement, “briefly” canceling “deathless” (and yet we say that love is eternal and spring is eternal, and that too is true). “To a Wall of Flame” is the most delightful poem about annihilation that I have ever come across.

First, the speaker notes that the snow is already thawing along the road. Then he makes the conjecture that his father, driving on this particular road with his wife asleep beside him, experienced a longing to “be simplified,” to cease being human, to be grass, to disappear. Levis makes this conjecture feel astonishingly real.

This is phantasmagoric poem. After all, Levis only imagines how his father felt, that he "longed to disappear" (but who hasn't had that longing?) Then there is the amazing imagined trembling at that wish, compared to the intimate touch of an imagined woman, her laughter making her a femme fatale, a Snow Queen perhaps (life is a cruel joke?) – or maybe the allegory of the human, since laughter keeps us from crying at all this disappearing. And it’s of course not only "men like us" who own nothing – ultimately no human being owns anything, except for a moment of delusion when we forget we can’t take it with us.

When I first read the poem, I liked it only from the steel mill part on. This is still the part I like best and find awesome, but I wouldn't want to lose the image of the mother sleeping in the car "in a gray dress." It's part of the mystery of poetry that details such as that gray dress are magical, and her sleep, and the father's trembling, and the marvelous accuracy of the sheets of ice being black as the ice is at the point of thawing in the river.

If you are having trouble with this poem, re-read it from

I remember, once,

In the steel mill where I worked

-- and just let yourself be seized by the power of the unfolding images, starting with the wall of flame as a kind of altar, and ending with the sheets of black ice sliding into the river.  

Marjorie:

I liked that poem by Larry Levis so much I sent it to one of my friends who is approaching 80 and is thus concerned about mortality. He is also a poetry lover and would-be poet. All he saw in Levis’ poem was that it was depressing, and he asked why I liked it.  Below is my answer.

**

I respond to a poem not only because of what it means but also because of how it says what it means.  This poem deals with a universal concern:  annihilation, nothingness after death.  For you, that makes it a depressing poem.  For me, that makes it an empathic poem.

Levis is also doing lots of skillful things in this poem.  There’s the early surprise of:  “I think my father longed to disappear . . . ” with its implied question for a reader, “How can anyone do that?” There are two women in the poem — the wife, sleeping beside her husband and thus unable to see. She’s in the early part of the poem. Then we have the ghost woman, who can’t be seen but runs fingers along the father’s spine in the later part of the poem. 

I love evocative images and similes.  In this poem we have:  “ . . . his thoughts moved like the shadow of a cloud over houses.” This is a wonderful image of sadness.  There’s mystery when Levis says, “And I never knew.”  What is it he never knew?  He’s giving us a poem about what transpired in his father’s mind. Is he simply using a superlative “never” to suggest that he absolutely didn’t understand when he was younger but understands now what it was like for his father? 

The ending touch, with the ghost woman who lets the man go, sends chills up MY spine.  And what about this ending image of the ghost woman’s laughter “turning into these sheets of black and glassy ice that dislodge themselves, and ride slowly out, onto the thawing river”?  My Lord!  You know how someone “breaks” into laughter and laughter comes in separate chunks?  The ice is a metaphor for the cold laughter of the ghost woman but also an image of eventual dissolution.  Annihilation as a sort of melting.

Of course, I am partial to father poems and have more than one favorite among them!

**

Oriana: 

Thank you, Marjorie, for the superb analysis.

This poem is an astonishing feat in more than one way, for instance in the dramatic use of both fire and ice. What immediately astonished me, however, was that Levis was inside his father's mind, and rendered all of this in realistic detail, as though it did happen, as though the father indeed "longed to disappear." This whole passage is wonderful, and so startling, I don't think there is any other poem in which anything like this is said:

I think my father longed to disappear
While driving through this place once,
In 1957.
Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress
While his thoughts moved like the shadow
Of a cloud over houses,
And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,
By his desire to be grass,
And simplified.
                                 

     ~ "seized by his own shyness" is a wonderful perception. The father is so shy he doesn't want to live anymore, at least not as himself.

The father is also presented as very stoical, which is confirmed by other poems we'll see him in. He dutifully goes about work, even though he hates his vinyard and his peach orchard

I do not know even know why my father
Lived out his one life
Farming two hundred acres of gray Málaga vines
And peach trees twisted
By winter. They lived, I think,
Because his hatred of them was entire,
And wordless.

I love the phrase "peach trees twisted by winter." The father himself is like winter, and the peach trees (peach being a symbol of sensual delight) are like him too, able to live on hatred.

And then we come to the erotic part, the "love-death" scene of this poem, where the father's "wish to be no one" makes him tremble and he feels the invisible woman's fingers "drifting up his spine in silence." Could there be a more perfect word here than "drifting"? And then the fabulous fusion of laughter and black sheets of melting ice. There is no need for me to add anything to Marjorie's exciting analysis of that final fused image.

This poem bears multiple re-reading. It becomes more vivid each time. And yet, for all we know, none of this happened! Talk about making the imaginary real . . . 

What further enlarges the poem is the existence of a literary and cinemanic tradition of encounter with the figure of Death. Death and the Maiden, The Erlking, conversations with Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal, Death as a beautiful woman in Cocteau's Orpheus . . .  and many more, including a handsome executioner in my own "April Snow" – but nothing quite like the figure in this poem: an invisible woman, intimate as a lover – with the wife asleep next to the man.

Marjorie:

I loved the twist on the two women in Levis’ poem—the woman who can’t see and the woman who can’t be seen.  But Levis is also playing with the opposites of fire and ice.  This made me think of Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice.” I wondered if Levis was thinking of that poem too.

Oriana:

I also thought about Frost's famous poem. Wouldn't it be magnificent if Larry Levis were still alive, and we could ask him? We'd email him, and given the kind of person he was, I think we'd get a satisfying answer.

I met him once at SDSU. He was already quite famous, and yet shy, almost self-effacing in a charming way. He and I talked about Zbigniew Herbert, whom Levis had known from Herbert's year at Cal State LA, having been his assistant. Levis was into vivid details also in conversation. He could drop his shyness and be very emotionally expressive, then hunch up into shyness again, with an almost apologetic smile. He was this big, husky country boy who perhaps felt awkward in academia. You could easily imagine him doing heavy farm labor, or any "macho" kind of work. (He was the opposite of Jack Gilbert that way. Gilbert frequently evokes the steel mills of Pittsburgh, but his slight build and intense intellectuality made me think of someone who frequents Parisian literary cafés.)

From Larry’s reading, I remember only two lines, which engraved itself on my psyche forever, and sent me a dream about being a bride swathed in endless layers of white garments, with a crone-like woman at my side who says to me, “If you wear only white, you are dressed for suicide.” I have no doubt that what the crone said in my dream originated in these two lines by Levis:

The white wedding dress is suicidal,

I know how the bride trembles putting it on.

He made a charming comment about those lines that I wish I remembered. But back then, who imagined that Larry would be leaving us so soon, dying of a heart attack at only forty-nine?

In an important way, though, he is still with us. Every time we read one of his poems, he speaks to us with a living voice.

Michael (from Guatemala)

Vision comes from beyond the words, doesn't it? It's where we stand along Levis's road, isn't it? Or are we riding in the car as Levis's father drives? Because this poem for me isn't about annihilation. Just the opposite. Levis's father is dazzled by the Lure, and feels the desire to live more fully. He is quietly desperate to be seen (as his sleeping, gray-clad wife could not see) and to wriggle free of the vines and peach trees. I felt his grip on the steering wheel, that need to turn from the rutted path, to make that left turn, and never stop driving. Ah, to be free from pruning the peach trees and the dullness of his wife. And finally, knowing the touch of the woman's fingers up his spine will never be realized, he allows the dream to float away, broken black ice drifting, melting into the stream of every man's despair--just as the flames erased the iron. And Levis felt reverence for this, this acceptance.

But then, that's my road.

**

Michael also provided this explanation of “the Lure”:

The Lure is a concept developed in Process theology – I think it's a John Cobb contribution. I equate it with Aristotle's entelechy, the will to thrive, the Moreness, the life that calls, the extravagant, gratuitous beauty of this world and beyond . . .

Oriana:

Thank you, Michael, for a very perceptive comment. Yes, we are riding in the car that the father drives, and we can see that the father is having an anxiety attack, or something close to it. He feels extremely lonely – as you point out, he is not “seen” by his wife. In fact, no one knows him. His hatred of tending the vines and the twisted peach trees remains unspoken. And even if he did speak about it, who would understand? People would likely tell him to count his blessings: his land and his family.

Why is the wife dressed in gray? Why are the vines gray? Especially when it comes to the wife’s dress, note that what we have here is only Larry Levis’s imagination, so he could have chosen another color if he didn’t want the symbolism of gray. A red dress would have an opposite connotation. But this grayness, along with the wife’s sleep, is the dailiness of marriage. So yes, I can easily see the father as “quietly desperate,” and occasionally feeling the urge to escape that gray “life of quiet desperation.”

Most people have experienced the potential richness of life, entelecheia, as opposed to the gray actuality. I call it the Gap. This is the realm in which we badly need to know what, if anything, can be changed. If change is not possible, then a stoic acceptance, exemplified by the father in this amazing poem, can be admirable (imagine if the father constantly complained, or drank, or threatened to commit suicide – or all of the above; or think of Tony Hoagland’s father, who left his family for a flight attendant).

Pondering the Gap and how we learn to live with it reminded me of “To My Ghost Reflected in the Auxvasse River,” and especially this passage:

When you would turn on the radio

And dance alone, in the kitchen

Of the diner,

I kept sweeping.

“Like father like son,” I want to sigh . . .  But we know that later the son did manage to escape into a more fulfilling life.  He says,

But in the long journey away from my father,

I took only his silences, his indifference

To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.

~ though in another famous poem, he mentions his father’s listening to Vivaldi – and Vivaldi’s music brims with spirit. Still, the father mainly suffers in stoic silence. His son chose words, chose music.

Obviously, whatever it is that we call spirit or soul prefers music and dancing to mundane chores. The chores must be done, however. We try to have some music and dancing also, because we will not be here forever. Some believe that if we do the chores diligently, we will have our reward in heaven, but there is no certainty of that. Larry Levis does not believe in heaven, except what fragments of it, what moments of beauty and bliss and fulfillment, we can enjoy in this life.

Personally, I am into Less-ness, but then my inner life is very rich, sometimes overwhelmingly so (or so it feels to an extreme introvert like myself).  I need the kind of Less which leads to More.  Sometimes when you concentrate on something very small, a great wealth starts unfolding.  But then I understand that by Moreness, Michael does not mean “more toys” (as in “The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys”). He means a qualitatively richer life, the opposite of father’s loneliness and his unspoken hatred of the gray vines and “peach trees twisted by winter.” That richer life includes glimpses of the sublime – including the wall of flame, even if the meaning of the flame is erasure. The sublime is an encounter with an energy greater than our own. We respond with awe. That is why Levis is an ecstatic poet: he worships the flame, and hears the music (be it of laughter) in the slide of the melting sheets of ice.

Una:

Maybe the reason I haven't commented on this poem is that I found it depressing.

It shows a quiet desperation which many of us feel, and hearing it the way he writes it makes me so sad, How many of us want to chuck it all like Gauguin but like LL's father soldier on.

Oriana:

The victory in this poem lies in its background, so to speak: the father’s “soldiering on” made it possible for Levis to get a good education and enjoy the life of the mind, as well as the closeness to nature he developed growing up in the countryside.

When people speak of chucking it up like Gauguin, they tend to forget that you have to be an accomplished painter first. And that takes a lot of hard work. And what Gauguin did in Tahiti was work. Painting paradise is work. We see only the finished product and it looks so easy and spontaneous.  We see the inspiration, not the perspiration. But take a moment to see Gauguin drenched in sweat, not only because of the heat, but also because of the inevitable frustration. And I don’t mean the frustration because the paintings weren’t selling and he was regarded as a failure; I mean the frustration of getting stuck, of knowing the composition doesn’t quite work, or the colors are not right, but not yet having the solution.  


Any work, any mode of life, requires some “soldiering on.” Maturity means, among other things, the ability to carry on with “grace under pressure.”

But to get back to the poem: as Marjorie points out, its triumph lies in the beautiful language and imagery, in the artistic perfection when the ending fuses the laughter of the ghost woman with the sliding of the sheets of black, thawing ice into the river – river being a also the river of time.

Lucrezia:

"Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress":  this is death.

The snow, the furnace:  the white whale.

I have never felt this way.

Faith is the opposite of fear.

Oriana:

That reminds me of my Aphrodite poem – I think an early version had the line

"Faith is the opposite of fear, says Lucrezia."

-- inspired by you. By the way, I’ve realized that Letters to Lucrezia is a collection I can simply self-publish. It’s dear to my heart.

I think we all have faith in something, in various things, or we couldn’t live. Levis could be called an atheist, but he had a strong sense of the sacred. In one of his essays, Milosz says that the real division is not believers and unbelievers, but those who have a sense of the sacred, and those who don’t – and that probably we are born that way. I think people who have a sense of beauty do have a sense of the sacred. It’s a deep part of the psyche.