Elegy For Whatever Had A Pattern In It
Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,
I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta
Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit
Out of an orchard in the heat of an August afternoon, I'm going to let you
Keep your eyes on him as he lifts & swings fifty-pound boxes of late
Elberta peaches up to me where I'm standing on a flatbed trailer & breathing in
Tractor exhaust so thick it bends the air, bends things seen through it
So that they seem to swim through the air.
It is a lousy job, & no one has to do it, & we do it.
We do it so that I can show you even what isn't there,
What's hidden. And signed by Time itself. And set spinning,
And is only a spider, after all, with its net waiting for what falls,
For what flies into it, & ages, & turns gray in a matter of minutes. The web
Is nothing's blueprint, bleached by the sun & whitened by it, it's what's left
After we've vanished, after we become what falls apart when anyone
Touches it, eyelash & collarbone dissolving into air, & time touching
The boxes we are wrapped in like gifts & splintering them
Into wood again, at the edge of a wood.
2
Black Widow is a name no one ever tinkered with or tried to change.
If you turn her on her back you can see the blood red hourglass figure
She carries on her belly,
Small as the design of a pirate I saw once on a tab of blotter acid
Before I took half of it, & a friend took the other, & then the two of us
Walked down to the empty post office beside the lake to look,
For some reason, at the wanted posters. We liked a little drama
In the ordinary then. Now a spider's enough.
And this one, in the legend she inhabits, is famous, & the male dies.
She eats its head after the eggs are fertilized.
It's the hourglass on her belly I remember, & the way the figure of it,
Figure eight of Time & Infinity, looked like something designed,
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poem by Larry Levis
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