Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:
you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way
a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?
and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the
tide swings you away before
I know I’m
alone again long since,
mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dreams drying.
–Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov, from Candles in Babylon: Poems; “A Child,” published c. 1982
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
… for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
Texts
excerpts from poems by Denise Levertov and the Latin Ordinary of the Mass
Denise Levertov
An excerpt from “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus” by Denise Levertov
When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.
–Denise Levertov
After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.
After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown
something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.
–Denise Levertov
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
—Denise Levertov
It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we’ve lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror … .
God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight’s gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung like laughing infants;
but on gray mornings,
all incident – our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth’s
beloved dust, leading the way – all,
is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.
–Denise Levertov
We live in history, says one.
We’re flies on the hide of Leviathan, says another.
Either way, says one,
fears and losses.
And among losses, says another,
the special places our own roads were to lead to.
Our deaths, says one.
That’s right, says another,
Now it’s to be a mass death.
Mass graves, says one, are nothing new.
No, says another, but this time there’ll be no graves,
all the dead will lie where they fall.
Except, says one, those that burn to ash.
And are blown in the fiery wind, says another.
How can we live in this fear? Says one.
From day to day, says another.
I still want to see, says one,
where my own road’s going.
I want to live, says another, but where can I live
if the world is gone?
–Denise Levertov
Sojourns in the Parallel World
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension–though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal–then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
–but we have changed, a little.
—Denise Levertov
Little Bristling Soul 