Peter Levy
The benefit of the
doubt.
Poems 1967-2006
‘Earth’s the right place for love…’,
Frost wrote. Mars isn’t. Multiple screens give us
the thrill, once again, of a new-found-land,
which Earth feels, but Mars doesn’t. Mars has discovered
nothing… I might be there, any language I use
to write this, impossible, or lost.
I might be there, unaware of a planet’s
rightness for love. Rock-dead. As now.
What I bring to the river is predictable:
a habitual tension, a muscular inflexibility
which makes the descent hard going,
the rocks I negotiate resistant,
though I’m the resister. When I get there
I undress meticulously, removing shoes,
clothes, glasses, watch in a well-rehearsed order,
positioning them unnecessarily, checking
and double-checking. Those possessions
are as yet impossibly heavy.
I dive into the river and almost immediately
am mutable, liquid – my periodic ‘wonderful’
acquires new music, its l is complicit
with the water which dissolves solidity;
and when I emerge ten minutes later,
I’m different: I dress leisurely,
unanxiously, my shoes, watch, glasses
have acquired a talismanic quality,
my hair has borrowed its whiteness from the waterfall,
or from that heron which appeared unexpectedly
the other evening, hovered a moment, balancing lightly
over the water, then continued downstream
into the distance, its flight as liquid as the river,
as I murmured ‘wonderful’, then made my way
up to the road again, effortlessly this time.
He died
aged 57 in March 2007, was also a much-loved teacher of English at the Faculty of
Letters (Arezzo) of Siena University.
