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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=431915" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>As It Begins With A Brush Stroke On A Snare Drum</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that<br>everything was clear,<br>As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered<br>stillness, &, for a while,<br>I did not even notice the pigeons lifting above the sad tiles<br>of churches,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or how they must have sounded like applause that is not<br>meant for anyone;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I must not have noticed that blind woman on the corner who<br>begged coins<br>For a living, who had one eye swelled shut entirely while<br>the other, a thin film<br>Of glaucoma over it that had taken on the lustreless sheen<br>of a nickel,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Was held wide open to witness spittle on the curb. And soon<br>the band<br>In their sun-bleached military uniforms were tuning up beneath<br>the blossom of rust<br>Covering the gazebo, its eaves festooned with the off-white<br>spiderwebs of unlit Christmas lights.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And that girl, Socorro, her smile surfacing voluptuously as<br>an unspoken thought</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Again, was selling gardenias—their petals already beginning<br>to appear<br>Faintly discolored around the edges—from a basket she carried<br>on her head<br>In an unwobbling stillness; Martin was selling chicklets but<br>no one bought</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Chicklets anymore; no one bought the little squawking birds<br>or the cheap stone<br>Animals turned out on a lathe in Veracruz, either; no one<br>wanted his shoes shined.<br>By then the band was playing show tunes from My Fair Lady<br>& South Pacific & was</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Interrupted only once because of a routine demonstration by<br>the Communists, who,<br>Mostly, were demonstrating because it was Sunday & because<br>that is what they did,<br>On Sundays. After a while I started walking vaguely away<br>beside some fading stonework,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Which in fact is not called Our Lady of Perfect Solitude nor<br>even Our Sister<br>Of Perpetual Solitude, but simply Santo Domingo. I do not<br>know why I walked near it then,<br>& passed without entering.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">*</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Still, in the painting the children kept skating, & the others <br>are probably<br>Walking home from school at this moment in their yellow<br>raincoats, with<br>The stale smells left on wax paper locked in their lunch pails. <br>That woman</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Keeps brushing her hair, & so somewhere it is still 1970 &<br>the riot police<br>Are spilling Out of their buses. On the marsh above the<br>Sound there were egrets,<br>There were black swans nesting in the rushes; the canal was <br>warm, & salty.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There was a cabin filling with so much moonlight I almost <br>believed I could<br>Dissolve in it if I sat very still, & I sat very still. I watched <br>my son<br>Skating at the edge of a pond in his sleep. It was summer <br>by the time</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I finally saw the painting in Brussels & counted each one of <br>the children as if<br>To make sure they were still there, & then gradually<br>lost count, & in the dream<br>Of the plowman on the hill there must have been the face<br>of an English poet</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Looking as lined as a maple leaf pressed between the pages <br>of a book. Beneath it<br>The Danube is gliding, & I am just holding his book now,<br>not even needing to read it<br>Anymore as I cross into the frontier—green wheat, alfalfa, a<br>feeling of distance</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In it all like sleep or rain reclaiming some lost, rural Missouri <br>slum town until<br>It no longer exists—& now the Hungarian checkpoint, where <br>guards with stars<br>The shade of American lipstick on their caps will enter & <br>seem proud of the unchipped,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Deep blue enamel on their machine guns. Most of them are<br>just poor teen-agers<br>From the surrounding villages & farms . . . & innocent, &</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The only glamour that is left<br>On the Orient Express<br>Is a soiled, torn doily on an armrest.<br>Rhyme then, rhyme & dream, but in the other painting, <br>which is not a painting,<br>They are trudging home from school in the rain which is like <br>a kind of sleep<br>When one of them thinks the mind is not the mind in the<br>unbewitched, meticulous,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">First shaping of numbers on a blackboard; it is only the<br>shadow of a skater over<br>A white pond. There is a sea beyond it, roughened by <br>whitecaps, & the mind<br>Moves first one way, then another, then both ways at once, <br>& then one long</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Glide past the pines that look black from this far away, but <br>aren't black.<br>The boy's friend is saying he 'hates school, but only sort <br>of.' But the child's<br>Not listening, he is thinking that something he painted was <br>something he dreamt,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then some of the dream got mixed in with the paint, <br>& then with recess,<br>The afternoon, this long walk in the rain, & now he will <br>never get it sorted<br>Out . . . In the story, the boy, falling, must have thought his<br>father had wings</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Unlike his own, & real. That is why the myth is so clear, <br>& so cruel,<br>And why we survive it. Yellow rain gear. Black woods. Gray <br>sky. Home<br>Is where you can forget some things, the boy is thinking,<br>because he is</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Tired from having to walk for so long & because he has left<br>his galoshes<br>At school & his shoes are wet as he unthinkingly turns his<br>back to me now,<br>Goes up the worn, slick steps of a front porch, & the door <br>closes. And,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Because I am not allowed to see it, there is a glass of milk<br>on the table,<br>The stairs behind it are dark, & from a narrow upstairs<br>window there is<br>A glimpse of the sea, & later, in his dream, there is sometimes<br>a father,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then it is more like a story about a father, & then it is <br>the hush of ice<br>Over a pond's surface. In spring, when it begins to thaw,<br>there is a little<br>Noise underneath it like steel sighing, if steel could sigh as<br>it seems to,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sometimes—when you are walking home alone on a trestle<br>above a river & there<br>Is a broken pattern of geese above it, a vee decomposing, a <br>sky mottled with blue<br>And some clouds. It is like a father dissolving, & setting you<br>free, & what</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Has the father ever achieved that will outlast his own <br>vanishing? And so<br>The boy spits over the raillng & watches the silvery web<br>of it falling<br>And thinning until it is gossamer, a filament untying itself <br>forever & saying</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Exactly what forever always meant to say—that this long pull <br>of spring tide in the river<br>Needs nothing, nothing except its one momentary witness,<br>a boy pausing</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Above it all on a bridge.<br>*<br>In Oaxaca, after the bomb went off, there were nevertheless <br>a few seconds . . .<br>A pure stillness in which I could hear the fountain in the <br>plaza, distant traffic,<br>The sudden silence of birds. Then everyone was rushing<br>through the streets</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Toward a place where sound had been, a place that wasn't <br>there. It is funny,<br>But the sound of a bomb, a few seconds after it has gone <br>off, is no longer even<br>Surprising. In a little while it seems only right, & sad. I sat <br>in the balcony of a restaurant</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Overlooking it all, & read a poem by Alberto Blanco in the <br>magazine edited by Paz,<br>And waited for the place to open, & in the next hour watched<br>the plaza<br>Gradually fill with the usual crowds . . . those who love, or<br>those who think they love,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Novelty; & change.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Larry+Levis">Larry Levis</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=431915" data-title="As It Begins With A Brush Stroke On A Snare Drum de Larry Levis" data-description="The plaza was so still in that moment two years ago that
everything was clear,
As if it had been preserved beneath a kind of lacquered
stillness, &, for a while,
I did not even notice the pigeons lifting above the sad tiles
of churches,

Or how th..."></div>
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