Parade & To Be Great

Parade

Ah what will I know other than myself

The dripping camelias their pearly lustre is kind

The hellebore are brooding under their dark leaves

They swirl in me threatening to wake

My poor life so indolent

And expectations violent

I met you poetry

in my youth so rigid

Wanting only to suffer

and be handed a trophy-cup

The laurel and the reed

In my youth I ran under the feet of parades

Great lurching revels of carved foam

Marching bands and torches

Spotlit eyes bigger than a year

turning to catch you in their beams

It’s time to think about them at last

And life in the finger-tips of the castle

The respite beneath the carts of fried dough

Under the sellers of the world

Now my paramour’s shoulder is kind, his flank cool in my hand

lucky the sleep saliva bubbling behind my teeth my eyelids dropping

The yelling sensation when the dog licks my toe

And I wake to sip from the bubble of the day

Its explicitly human terror

I don’t rise to say that beauty is immortal and still

To contemplate the plump and paranoid solutions

Of detective stories

I don’t compare the virtue of powdered sugar with that of marrow

Sucked out of a bone

drizzled with comfrey and saffron

Nor do I rage against letters in my mailbox describing

The bourgeoisie’s good works

Or curse Sophocles for his happy pride

About forcing a kiss on the slave boy who poured the wine

(Such, he said, are my stratagems!

And they said I didn’t know how to conquer!)

I don’t estimate the world as it goes by

Imagine it or love it

I say I have stepped in dog water with my fresh socks again

And things must be like that and they are like that

The dogs’ blue ball that accidentally glows

A sea cucumber in the little dog's mouth its streaks

Of poisonous energy as a good morning

Are kind

And the new shoots of grass under withered raspberry canes

Protected by thorns

I shake out my nettle-stung fingers

To yell is greater than to yield and better than all of these

Is to stop and think

So don’t weep because the darkness of the sea was not that of wine

Because dawn’s rosy fingers were purple, or bloodless

Because violet candy was sugar-crusted but still soapy

And the amethyst sky more violent than violet

Its crystal latticework a laser-crowded killer

Remember, I saw the white breast of the noble scrub jay

It was the size of three scrub jays

It squeaked

It sat at the tip of the last branch

of the denuded apricot tree

I saw the squirrel in the next door redwood

chittering fighting chasing its days

Its ascent into the tracery

of thinnest branches

Must be easier than it looks, I think

As I rappel down into a dark patch of tears

Descent too isn't more than a path

The tree is nature’s slope

And the past isn’t dead because it has carved

Its passageways inside us with the ferocity of the solar wind

Under the trees bent under their shining plastic garlands

Time fluoresces to make oxygen for us

Down at the dark sea-bed

What compared to this is the cloudiness of the future

Or even the dull rock of fate

I saw a parade of people running past me

they wanted to live

Someday I will be made of their parts

I fill the fountain with blood to anticipate their return

I squeeze my eyes tight

In the end, I don’t know if time is a kind

or a malicious invention

And what will I do with this search-beam

pouring from my eyes?

Disenchantment is in the dog’s tongue as he yawns

He looks at me and says bed

An end to your absurd conveyances

To Be Great

A blue moon a blue mood I’d break the rules

But I can’t remember them Alice’s defiance

hazy over my mind like a broken bottle,

scent trace in an empty stanza (I don’t want to say

“room”). A nice day, hot, but the rose won’t

Be weeded, needled my palm. Poems don’t

Want me to write them either. I’d be on

Strike too, if Alice had been writing me

And then it was you, I say to myself –

Oh, unkindly. But one of my rules

Is to sound confident, so I must

Break that too. All the poems are all the world’s

To write. I wasn’t going to die but

I guess I will, since you did first. I never

Thought you would. You got older as you aged

But in an ageless way, more vatic.

Oh what are we to do? No time left

To be great, with the great ones gone.

//

Lauren Levin is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of three full-length poetry collections and a number of chapbooks. Their first book, The Braid, won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. With Eric Sneathen, they edited Honey Mine by Camille Roy (Nightboat Books, 2021). Recent work appears in the chapbook A Little Chat with the Sun from Clones Go Home and in the journals Noir Sauna and antiphony. They publish a zine called the Nashville Warbler, which celebrates the poets and writers of the untitled reading series at Tamarack. From New Orleans, LA, they live and work in Richmond, CA.