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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=431936" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Widening Spell of the Leaves</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968<br>--for my brother</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.<br>I was driving south toward a large city famous<br>For so little it had a replica, in concrete,<br>In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck<br>In the midst of traffic, &amp; obstructing it.<br>But the city was hours away, beyond the hills<br>Shaped like the bodies of sleeping women.<br>Often I had to slow down for herds of goats<br>Or cattle milling on those narrow roads, &amp; for<br>The narrower, lost, stone streets of villages<br>I passed through. The pains in my stomach had grown<br>Gradually sharper &amp; more frequent as the day<br>Wore on, &amp; now a fever had set up house.<br>In the villages there wasn't much point in asking<br>Anyone for help. In those places, where tanks<br>Were bivouacked in shade on their way back<br>From some routine exercise along<br>The Danube, even food was scarce that year.<br>And the languages shifted for no clear reason<br>From two hard quarries of Slavic into German,<br>Then to a shred of Latin spliced with oohs<br>And hisses. Even when I tried the simplest phrases,<br>The peasants passing over those uneven stones<br>Paused just long enough to look up once,<br>Uncomprehendingly. Then they turned<br>Quickly away, vanishing quietly into that<br>Moment, like bark chips whirled downriver.<br>It was autumn. Beyond each village the wind<br>Threw gusts of yellowing leaves across the road.<br>The goats I passed were thin, gray; their hind legs,<br>Caked with dried shit, seesawed along--<br>Not even mild contempt in their expressionless,<br>Pale eyes, &amp; their brays like the scraping of metal.<br>Except for one village that had a kind<br>Of museum where I stopped to rest, &amp; saw<br>A dead Scythian soldier under glass,<br>Turning to dust while holding a small sword<br>At attention forever, there wasn't much to look at.<br>Wind, leaves, goats, the higher passes<br>Locked in stone, the peasants with their fate<br>Embroidering a stillness into them,<br>And a spell over all things in that landscape,<br>Like . . .<br> That was the trouble; it couldn't be<br>Compared to anything else, not even the sleep<br>Of some asylum at a wood's edge with the sound<br>Of a pond's spillway beside it. But as each cramp<br>Grew worse &amp; lasted longer than the one before,<br>It was hard to keep myself aloof from the threadbare<br>World walking on that road. After all,<br>Even as they moved, the peasants, the herds of goats<br>And cattle, the spiralling leaves, at least were part<br>Of that spell, that stillness.<br>After a while,<br>The villages grew even poorer, then thinned out,<br>Then vanished entirely. An hour later,<br>There were no longer even the goats, only wind,<br>Then more &amp; more leaves blown over the road, sometimes<br>Covering it completely for a second.<br>And yet, except for a random oak or some brush<br>Writhing out of the ravine I drove beside,<br>The trees had thinned into rock, into large,<br>Tough blonde rosettes of fading pasture grass.<br>Then that gave out in a bare plateau. . . . And then,<br>Easing the Dacia down a winding grade<br>In second gear, rounding a long, funneled curve--<br>In a complete stillness of yellow leaves filling<br>A wide field--like something thoughtlessly,<br>Mistakenly erased, the road simply ended.<br>I stopped the car. There was no wind now.<br>I expected that, &amp; though I was sick &amp; lost,<br>I wasn't afraid. I should have been afraid.<br>To this day I don't know why I wasn't.<br>I could hear time cease, the field quietly widen.<br>I could feel the spreading stillness of the place<br>Moving like something I'd witnessed as a child,<br>Like the ancient, armored leisure of some reptile<br>Gliding, gray-yellow, into the slightly tepid,<br>Unidentical gray-brown stillness of the water--<br>Something blank &amp; unresponsive in its tough,<br>Pimpled skin--seen only a moment, then unseen<br>As it submerged to rest on mud, or glided just<br>Beneath the lustreless, calm yellow leaves<br>That clustered along a log, or floated there<br>In broken ringlets, held by a gray froth<br>On the opaque, unbroken surface of the pond,<br>Which reflected nothing, no one.<br>And then I remembered.<br>When I was a child, our neighbors would disappear.<br>And there wasn't a pond of crocodiles at all.<br>And they hadn't moved. They couldn't move. They<br>Lived in the small, fenced-off backwater<br>Of a canal. I'd never seen them alive. They<br>Were in still photographs taken on the Ivory Coast.<br>I saw them only once in a studio when<br>I was a child in a city I once loved.<br>I was afraid until our neighbor, a photographer,<br>Explained it all to me, explained how far<br>Away they were, how harmless; how they were praised<br>In rituals as &quot;powers.&quot; But they had no &quot;powers,&quot;<br>He said. The next week he vanished. I thought<br>Someone had cast a spell &amp; that the crocodiles<br>Swam out of the pictures on the wall &amp; grew<br>Silently &amp; multiplied &amp; then turned into<br>Shadows resting on the banks of lakes &amp; streams<br>Or took the shapes of fallen logs in campgrounds<br>In the mountains. They ate our neighbor, Mr. Hirata. <br>They ate his whole family. That is what I believed,<br>Then. . .that someone had cast a spell. I did not<br>Know childhood was a spell, or that then there<br>Had been another spell, too quiet to hear,<br>Entering my city, entering the dust we ate. . . .<br>No one knew it then. No one could see it,<br>Though it spread through lawnless miles of housing tracts,<br>And the new, bare, treeless streets; it slipped<br>Into the vacant rows of warehouses &amp; picked<br>The padlocked doors of working-class bars<br>And union halls &amp; shuttered, empty diners.<br>And how it clung! (forever, if one had noticed)<br>To the brothel with the pastel tassels on the shade<br>Of an unlit table lamp. Farther in, it feasted<br>On the decaying light of failing shopping centers;<br>It spilled into the older, tree-lined neighborhoods,<br>Into warm houses, sealing itself into books<br>Of bedtime stories read each night by fathers--<br>The books lying open to the flat, neglected<br>Light of dawn; &amp; it settled like dust on windowsills<br>Downtown, filling the smug caf&eacute;s, schools, <br>Banks, offices, taverns, gymnasiums, hotels,<br>Newsstands, courtrooms, opium parlors, Basque<br>Restaurants, Armenian steam baths,<br>French bakeries, &amp; two of the florists' shops--<br>Their plate glass windows smashed forever.<br>Finally it tried to infiltrate the exact<br>Center of my city, a small square bordered<br>With palm trees, olives, cypresses, a square<br>Where no one gathered, not even thieves or lovers.<br>It was a place which no longer had any purpose,<br>But held itself aloof, I thought, the way<br>A deaf aunt might, from opinions, styles, gossip.<br>I liked it there. It was completely lifeless,<br>Sad &amp; clear in what seemed always a perfect, <br>Windless noon. I saw it first as a child,<br>Looking down at it from that as yet <br>Unvandalized, makeshift studio.<br>I remember leaning my right cheek against<br>A striped beach ball so that Mr. Hirata--<br>Who was Japanese, who would be sent the next week<br>To a place called Manzanar, a detention camp<br>Hidden in stunted pines almost above<br>The Sierra timberline--could take my picture.<br>I remember the way he lovingly relished <br>Each camera angle, the unwobbling tripod, <br>The way he checked each aperture against<br>The light meter, in love with all things<br>That were not accidental, &amp; I remember<br>The care he took when focusing; how<br>He tried two different lens filters before<br>He found the one appropriate for that<br>Sensual, late, slow blush of afternoon<br>Falling through the one broad bay window.<br>I remember holding still &amp; looking down<br>Into the square because he asked me to;<br>Because my mother &amp; father had asked me please<br>To obey &amp; be patient &amp; allow the man--<br>Whose business was failing anyway by then--<br>To work as long as he wished to without any<br>Irritations or annoyances before<br>He would have to spend these years, my father said,<br>Far away, in snow, &amp; without his cameras.<br>But Mr. Hirata did not work. He played.<br>His toys gleamed there. That much was clear to me . . . .<br>That was the day I decided I would never work.<br>It felt like a conversion. Play was sacred.<br>My father waited behind us on a sofa made<br>From car seats. One spring kept nosing through.<br>I remember the camera opening into the light . . . .<br>And I remember the dark after, the studio closed,<br>The cameras stolen, slivers of glass from the smashed<br>Bay window littering the unsanded floors,<br>And the square below it bathed in sunlight . . . . All this<br>Before Mr. Hirata died, months later,<br>From complications following pneumonia.<br>His death, a letter from a camp official said,<br>Was purely accidental. I didn't believe it.<br>Diseases were wise. Diseases, like the polio<br>My sister had endured, floating paralyzed<br>And strapped into her wheelchair all through<br>That war, seemed too precise. Like photographs . . .<br>Except disease left nothing. Disease was like<br>And equation that drank up light &amp; never ended,<br>Not even in summer. Before my fever broke,<br>And the pains lessened, I could actually see<br>Myself, in the exact center of that square.<br>How still it had become in my absence, &amp; how<br>Immaculate, windless, sunlit. I could see<br>The outline of every leaf on the nearest tree,<br>See it more clearly than ever, more clearly than<br>I had seen anything before in my whole life:<br>Against the modest, dark gray, solemn trunk,<br>The leaves were becoming only what they had to be--<br>Calm, yellow, things in themselves &amp; nothing<br>More--&amp; frankly they were nothing in themselves,<br>Nothing except their little reassurance<br>Of persisting for a few more days, or returning<br>The year after, &amp; the year after that, &amp; every<br>Year following--estranged from us by now--&amp; clear,<br>So clear not one in a thousand trembled; hushed<br>And always coming back--steadfast, orderly,<br>Taciturn, oblivious--until the end of Time.</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=431936" data-title="The Widening Spell of the Leaves de Larry Levis" data-description="--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother

Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuc..."></div>
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