A Philip Levine Collection


Title:  Ashes  Poems New and Old
Printing:  First Antheneum Edition
Year of publication:  1979
Publisher:  Atheneum
City:  New York
Number of Pages:  66
Cover:  paperback
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:  78-20596
ISBN:  0-689-10975-X
Comments:  Ashes contains 13 poems from Red Dust (1971) plus 19 new poems.
Ashes was also published in a limited edition by Gray Wolf Press of Port Townsend, Washington.

Table of Contents:
  • I
    • Father
    • Clouds
    • House of Silence
    • Noon
    • The Miracle
    • In the New Sun
    • Fist
    • The End of your Life
    • The Rains
    • Where We Live Now
    • Red Dust
    • How Much Earth
    • A Sleepless Night
    • Told
    • I Won, You Lost
    • Any Night
  • II
    • Starlight
    • A Woman Waking
    • Everything
    • Holding On
    • Songs
    • Montjuich
    • Nitrate
    • Making It New
    • The Red Shirt
    • The Helmet
    • On a Drawing by Flavio
    • Something has Fallen
    • The Grave of the Kitchen Mouse
    • The Water's Chant
    • Ashes
    • Lost and Found



cover:  Flavio Constantini


House of Silence

The winter sun, golden and tired,
settles on the irregular army
of bottles. Outside the trucks
jostle toward the open road,
outside it's Saturday afternoon,
and young women in black pass by
arm in arm. This bar
is the house of silence, and we drink
to silence without raising our voices
in the old way. We drink to doors
that don't open, to the four walls
that close their eyes, hands that run,
fingers that count change, toes
that add up to ten. Suspended
as we are between our business
and our rest, we feel the sudden peace
of wine and the agony of stale bread.
Columbus sailed from here 30 years ago
and never wrote home. On Saturdays
like this the phone still rings for him.






photo credits:  Thomas Victor