A Philip Levine Collection

	Title: Selected Poems Printing: First Year of publication: 1984 Publisher: Atheneum. City: New York Number of Pages: 234 Cover: paperback Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-45522 ISBN: 0-689-11457-5 Table of Contents: From On the Edge Lights I have Seen Before For Fran My Poets L'Homme et la Bete On the Edge The Horse From Not This Pig A New Day Blasting from Heaven To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop The Cemetery at Academy, California Silent in America The Midget Heaven Waking an Angel Animals are Passing from our Lives Baby Villon From Red Dust Clouds Noon Holding On Fist How Much Can it Hurt The Helmet Red Dust How Much Earth A Sleepless Night Told From Pili's Wall Pili's Wall I-X From They Feed They Lion Renaming the Kings To a Fish Head Found on the Beach near Málaga Salami Coming Home Detroit Grease Shop Poem Saturday Sweeping Angel Butcher They Feed They Lion The Children's Crusade Later Still To P.L.;1916-1937 Breath From 1933 Zaydee Grandmother in Heaven Late Moon At the Fillmore The Poem Circling HamTramck, Michigan All Night in Search of You Letters for the Dead Goodbye Uncle 1933 Hold Me From The Names of the Lost On the Birth of Good & Evil during the Long Winter of '28 No One Remembers Belle Island, 1949 New Season On the Corner Gift for a Believer Wednesday My Son and I A Late Answer On the Murder of Lieutenant José del Castillo by the Falangist Bravo Martinez, July 22, 1936 Ask the Roses And the Trains Go On To My God in His Sickness From Ashes The Miracle Starlight Nitrate Making It New On a Drawing by Flavio Ashes Lost and Found From 7 Years from Somewhere I Could Believe Planting Francisco, I'll Bring You Red Carnations Milkweed Hear Me The Last Step The Face Let Me Begin Again Snow Words You Can Have It Let Me Be 7 Years from Somewhere From One For the Rose Having Been Asked "What is a Man?" I Answer The Poem of Flight I Was Born in Lucerne Roofs The Conductor of Nothing The Fox Genius To Cipriano, in the Wind Belief Sources Rain Downriver The Suit The Voice On my Own One for the Rose
photo: Swallow, Egyptian limestone relief, c. 400 B.C.
	I Could Believe I could come to believe almost anything, even my sould, which is my unlit cigar, even the earth that huddled all these years to my bones, waiting for the little of me it would claim. I could believe my sons would grow into tall lean booted men driving cattle trucks to Monday markets, and my mother would climb into the stars hand over hand, a woman of imagination and stamina among the airy spaces of broken clouds, and I, middle aged and heavy, would buy my suits by the dozen, vested ones, and wear a watch chain stretched across my middle. Even with none of that, alone, and naked at the club, laid out to be rubbed down, I would groan orders to a T-shirted half-wit. I came home from Spain, bitter and wounded, opened a small portrait shop in an office building in Detroit, hired an alcoholic camera man and married a homely woman good with books. It is 1943 and young girls wait in line for the white lights blinding them, drop their blouses and shoulder straps and smile for the men scrambling on Pacific atolls. I have bought a second shop on Washington Blvd. When I can't stand it I drive out past the lights of the small factories where the bearings for tanks and half-tracks are ground, and park and smoke in silence on the shoulder of US 24, 7000 miles from my lost Spain, a lifetime from Ebro where 7 men I came to need went under in a small boat and I crossed alone to a burnt shore and kept running. Someone said it was Prospect Park in the summer, except for the dying. Except for the dying this would be heaven and I, 37 years old, would be a man I could talk to or a body fallen away to the dust of Spain, a white face becoming water, a name no one names, a scramble of sounds, hiccups and the striking of teeth against teeth, except for the dying I would be dead, my face born forever on an inside page of the Detroit Free Press, except for the dying I could believe.