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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=431919" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Elegy For Whatever Had A Pattern In It</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels<br>And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta<br>Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Out of an orchard in the heat of an August afternoon, I'm going to let you</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Keep your eyes on him as he lifts & swings fifty-pound boxes of late<br>Elberta peaches up to me where I'm standing on a flatbed trailer & breathing in<br>Tractor exhaust so thick it bends the air, bends things seen through it</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So that they seem to swim through the air.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It is a lousy job, & no one has to do it, & we do it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We do it so that I can show you even what isn't there,<br>What's hidden. And signed by Time itself. And set spinning,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And is only a spider, after all, with its net waiting for what falls,<br>For what flies into it, & ages, & turns gray in a matter of minutes. The web<br>Is nothing's blueprint, bleached by the sun & whitened by it, it's what's left</div><div style="margin:10px 0">After we've vanished, after we become what falls apart when anyone</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Touches it, eyelash & collarbone dissolving into air, & time touching<br>The boxes we are wrapped in like gifts & splintering them</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Into wood again, at the edge of a wood.<br>2</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Black Widow is a name no one ever tinkered with or tried to change.<br>If you turn her on her back you can see the blood red hourglass figure</div><div style="margin:10px 0">She carries on her belly,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Small as the design of a pirate I saw once on a tab of blotter acid</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Before I took half of it, & a friend took the other, & then the two of us <br>Walked down to the empty post office beside the lake to look,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For some reason, at the wanted posters. We liked a little drama<br>In the ordinary then. Now a spider's enough.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And this one, in the legend she inhabits, is famous, & the male dies.<br>She eats its head after the eggs are fertilized.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It's the hourglass on her belly I remember, & the way the figure of it,<br>Figure eight of Time & Infinity, looked like something designed,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Etched or embossed upon the slick undershell, & the way there was,<br>The first time I saw it, a stillness in the pattern that was not<br>The stillness of the leaves or the stillness of the sky over the leaves.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">After the male dies she goes off & the eggs</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Live in the fraying sail</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of an abandoned web strung up in the corner of a picking box or beneath<br>Some slowly yellowing grape leaf among hundreds of other<br>Leaves, in autumn, the eggs smaller than the o in this typescript</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or a handwritten apostrophe in ink.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What do they represent but emptiness, some gold camp settlement<br>In the Sierras swept clean by smallpox, & wind?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Canal school with its three rooms, its bell & the rope you rang it with<br>And no one there in the empty sunlight, ring & after ring & echo.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It magnifies & I can't explain it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Piedra, Conejo, Parlier. Stars & towns, blown fire & wind.<br>Deneb & Altair, invisible kindling, nothing above nothing.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It magnifies & I can't explain it.<br>3 </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Expressionless spinster, carrying Time's signature preserved & signed<br>In blood & hidden beneath you, you move two steps<br>To the right & hold still, then one step to the left,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And hold still again, motionless as the web you wait in.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Motionless as the story you wait in & inhabit but did not spin<br>And did not repeat. You wait in the beehive hairdo of the girl<br>Sitting across from me in class, wait in your eggs,<br>4</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wait in the hair the girl teases & sprays once more at recess.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Lipstick, heels, tight sweater, leather anklet.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The story has no point but stillness itself, absence in a school desk,<br>The hacked and scratched names visible in the varnished wood,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No one there, the bell with its ring & after ring & echo.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In class, I remember, she would look back at me with a gaze deeper<br>Than calm, blanker than a pond's scummed & motionless surface,<br>Beneath which there was nothing, nothing taking the shape of someone</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Who had already drowned but could not die, & so sat in class<br>Because she had to, because that was the law.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Mrs. Avery went on & on at the blackboard so we could know <br>Who Magellan & Vizcaino had been, or sometimes she would make</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The boy who spoke only Spanish read from a book,<br>Watch him as he used his forefinger to point at each syllable</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He would read, read & mispronounce, & stumble over, & go on.<br>§</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And this isn't much of a story either, but it's one I know:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">One afternoon in August, two black widow spiders bit Ediesto Huerta.<br>He killed them both & went on working,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Went on swinging the boxes up to me. In a few minutes the sweat<br>Bathed his face until it glistened, & still he went on working;<br>And when I asked him to stop he would not & instead</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Seemed to begin to dance slowly in the rhythms of the work,<br>Swing & heft & turning back for another box, then</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Swing, heft, & turning back again. And within a half hour or so,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Without him resting once but merely swinging box after box</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Of peaches up to me in the heat, the fever broke.<br>5</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the middle of turning away again, he stopped dancing,<br>He stopped working. He seemed to be listening to something, & then</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He passed out & fell flat on his back. It looked as if he had gone to sleep<br>For a moment. I let the idling tractor sputter & die, & by the time</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I reached him, he had awakened, &, in the next moment, his face</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Began twitching, his arms & legs danced to something without music<br>And then stiffened, his jaws clenched & his eyes fluttered open<br>And turned a pure white. I made a stick from a peach limb & tore</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The leaves & shoots off it & stuck it between his teeth</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As I heard one was supposed to, &, in this way, almost<br>Killed him by suffocation, & so took the stick out & threw it away.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And later lifted him by the one arm he extended to me & pulled him up onto<br>The bed of the trailer. He dangled his legs off the rear of it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We sat there, saying nothing.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It was so quiet we could hear the birds around us in the trees.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then he turned to me, &, addressing me in a name as old as childhood,<br>Said, 'Hey Cowboy, you wanna cigarette?'<br>§</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the story, no one can remember whether it was car theft or burglary,<br>But in fact, Ediesto Huerta was tried & convicted of something, & so, afterward,<br>Became motionless & silent in the web spun around him by misfortune.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the penitentiary the lights stay on forever,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Cell after cell after cell, they call their names out, caught in time.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ring, & after ring, & echo.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the story, the girl always dies of spider bites,<br>When in fact she disappeared by breaking into the jagged pieces of glass<br>Littering the roadsides & glinting in the empty light that shines there. 6</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All we are is representation, what we appear to be & are, & are not,<br>And representation is all we remember,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Something hesitating & looking back & caught for a moment.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">God in the design on a spider's belly, standing for time & infinity,<br>Looks back, looks back just once, then never again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We go without a trace, I am thinking. We go & there's no one there,<br>No one to meet us on the long drive lined with orange trees,<br>Cypresses, the bleaching fronds of palm trees,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And though the town is still there when I return to it, when I'm gone<br>The track is empty beside the station, & the station is boarded up,<br>Boarded over, the town is overgrown with leaves, with weeds</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Tall as windowsills, window glass out & dark inside the shops.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The classrooms & school are gone & the bell, & the rope<br>To ring it with, & the boy reading form the book, forefinger<br>On a syllable he can't pronounce & stumbles over again & again.<br>§</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All we are is representation, what we are & are not,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Clear & then going dark again, all we are<br>Is the design or insignia that misrepresents what we are, & stays</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Behind, & looks back at us without expression, empty road in sunlight.<br>I once drove in a '48 Jimmy truck with three tons of fruit<br>On it & the flooring beneath the clutch so worn away I could see</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The road go past beneath me, the oil flecked light & shadow</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Picking up speed. Angel & Johnny Dominguez, Ediesto Huerta,<br>Jaime Vaca & Coronado Solares, Querido Flacco<br>7</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And the one called Dead Rat & the one called Camelias;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We go without a trace, I am thinking.<br>§</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Today you were lying in bed, drinking tea, reading the newspaper,<br>A look of concentration on your face, of absorption in some</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Story or other.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It looked so peaceful, you reading, the bed, the sunlight over everything.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There is a blueprint of something never finished, something I'll never<br>Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth,<br>Holding me in a time that's gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The figure in the hourglass & the body swinging in the rhythm of its work.<br>The body reclining in bed, forgetting what it is, & who.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">While the night goes on with its work, the stars & the shapes they make,<br>Cold vein in the leaf & in the wind,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What are we but what we offer up?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Gifts we give, things for oblivion to look at, & puzzle over, & set aside.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber ball<br>In the photograph I have of him, head on the table & resting his cheek<br>Against the cool surface of the ball, the one that is finished spinning, the one</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He won't give back.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oblivion who has my face in the photograph, my cheek resting<br>Against a child's striped ball.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oblivion with his blown fires, & empty towns...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oblivion who would be nothing without us, I am thinking,<br>8</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As if we're put on the earth to forget the ending, & wander.<br>And walk alone. And walk in the midst of great crowds,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And never come back.</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=431919" data-title="Elegy For Whatever Had A Pattern In It de Larry Levis" data-description="Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,

I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta
Right in front of you so you can watch..."></div>
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