Thinking About the Poet Larry Levis
One Afternoon in Late May

Rainy Saturday, Larry dead
                                                 almost three weeks now,
Rain starting to pool in the low spots
And creases along the drive.
                                                     Between showers, the saying goes,
Roses and rhododendron wax glint
Through dogwood and locust leaves,
Flesh-colored, flesh-destined, spring in false flower, good-bye.

The world was born when the devil yawned,
                                                                               the legend goes,
And who's to say it's not true,
Color of flesh, some inner and hidden bloom of flesh.
Rain back again, then back off,
Sunlight suffused like a chest pain across the tree limbs.
God, the gathering night, assumes it.

We haven't a clue as to what counts
In the secret landscape behind the landscape we look at here.
We just don't know what matters,
                                                            May dull and death-distanced,
Sky half-lit and grackle-ganged —
It's all the same dark, it's all the same absence of dark.
Part of the rain has now fallen, the rest still to fall.

By Charles Wright
Recipient of the 2009 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
from Appalachia by Charles Wright.
Copyright © 1998 by Charles Wright.