Elegy For Whatever Had a Pattern In It

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,

Etched or embossed upon the slick undershell,
& the way there was,
The first time I saw it, a stillness in the pattern
that was not the stillness of the leaves
or the stillness of the sky over the leaves.

After the male dies she goes off & the eggs

Live in the fraying sail

Of an abandoned web strung up in the corner of a picking box
or beneath some slowly yellowing grape leaf among hundreds
of other leaves, in autumn, the eggs smaller
than the o in this typescript

Or a handwritten apostrophe in ink.

What do they represent but emptiness,
some gold camp settlement in the Sierras swept clean
by smallpox, & wind?

Canal school with its three rooms, its bell & the rope
you rang it with and no one there in the empty sunlight,
ring & after ring & echo.

It magnifies & I can't explain it.

Piedra, Conejo, Parlier. Stars & towns, blown fire & wind.
Deneb & Altair, invisible kindling, nothing above nothing.

It magnifies & I can't explain it.
3

Expressionless spinster, carrying Time's signature
preserved & signed in blood & hidden beneath you,
you move two steps to the right & hold still,
then one step to the left,

And hold still again, motionless as the web you wait in.

Motionless as the story you wait in
& inhabit but did not spin and did not repeat.
You wait in the beehive hairdo of the girl
sitting across from me in class, wait in your eggs,
4

Wait in the hair the girl teases & sprays once more
at recess.

Lipstick, heels, tight sweater, leather anklet.

The story has no point but stillness itself,
absence in a school desk, the hacked and scratched names
visible in the varnished wood,

No one there, the bell with its ring & after ring & echo.

In class, I remember, she would look back at me
with a gaze deeper than calm, blanker than a pond's scummed
& motionless surface, beneath which there was nothing,
nothing taking the shape of someone

Who had already drowned but could not die, & so sat in class
Because she had to, because that was the law.

Mrs. Avery went on & on at the blackboard so we could know
Who Magellan & Vizcaino had been, or sometimes she would make

The boy who spoke only Spanish read from a book,
Watch him as he used his forefinger to point at each syllable

He would read, read & mispronounce, & stumble over, & go on.
5

And this isn't much of a story either, but it's one I know:

One afternoon in August, two black widow spiders bit
Ediesto Huerta. He killed them both & went on working,

Went on swinging the boxes up to me.
In a few minutes the sweat bathed his face until
it glistened, & still he went on working;
And when I asked him to stop he would not & instead

Seemed to begin to dance slowly in the rhythms of the work,
Swing & heft & turning back for another box, then

Swing, heft, & turning back again. And within a half hour or so,

Without him resting once but merely swinging box after box

Of peaches up to me in the heat, the fever broke.
6

In the middle of turning away again, he stopped dancing,
He stopped working. He seemed to be listening to something,
& then

He passed out & fell flat on his back. It looked as if
he had gone to sleep for a moment. I let the idling tractor
sputter & die, & by the time

I reached him, he had awakened, &, in the next moment,
his face

Began twitching, his arms & legs danced to something
without music and then stiffened, his jaws clenched
& his eyes fluttered open and turned a pure white.
I made a stick from a peach limb & tore

The leaves & shoots off it & stuck it between his teeth

As I heard one was supposed to, &, in this way, almost
Killed him by suffocation, & so took the stick out
& threw it away.

And later lifted him by the one arm he extended to me
& pulled him up onto the bed of the trailer.
He dangled his legs off the rear of it.

We sat there, saying nothing.

It was so quiet we could hear the birds around us
in the trees.

And then he turned to me, &, addressing me in a name
as old as childhood,
Said, "Hey Cowboy, you wanna cigarette?"
§

In the story, no one can remember whether it was car theft
or burglary, but in fact, Ediesto Huerta was tried & convicted
of something, & so, afterward, became motionless & silent
in the web spun around him by misfortune.

In the penitentiary the lights stay on forever,

Cell after cell after cell, they call their names out,
caught in time.

Ring, & after ring, & echo.

In the story, the girl always dies of spider bites,
When in fact she disappeared by breaking into the jagged
pieces of glass littering the roadsides & glinting
in the empty light that shines there. 7

All we are is representation, what we appear to be & are,
& are not, and representation is all we remember,

Something hesitating & looking back & caught for a moment.

God in the design on a spider's belly, standing for time
& infinity, looks back, looks back just once, then never again.

We go without a trace, I am thinking. We go
& there's no one there,
No one to meet us on the long drive lined with orange trees,
Cypresses, the bleaching fronds of palm trees,

And though the town is still there when I return to it,
when I'm gone the track is empty beside the station,
& the station is boarded up,
Boarded over, the town is overgrown with leaves, with weeds

Tall as windowsills, window glass out & dark inside the shops.

The classrooms & school are gone & the bell, & the rope
To ring it with, & the boy reading form the book, forefinger
On a syllable he can't pronounce & stumbles over
again & again.
§

All we are is representation, what we are & are not,

Clear & then going dark again, all we are
Is the design or insignia that misrepresents what we are,
& stays

Behind, & looks back at us without expression,
empty road in sunlight.
I once drove in a '48 Jimmy truck with three tons of fruit
On it & the flooring beneath the clutch so worn away
I could see

The road go past beneath me, the oil flecked light
& shadow

Picking up speed. Angel & Johnny Dominguez, Ediesto Huerta,
Jaime Vaca & Coronado Solares, Querido Flacco
7

And the one called Dead Rat & the one called Camelias;

We go without a trace, I am thinking.
§

Today you were lying in bed, drinking tea,
reading the newspaper, a look of concentration on your face,
of absorption in some

Story or other.

It looked so peaceful, you reading, the bed, the sunlight
over everything.

There is a blueprint of something never finished,
something I'll never find my way out of, some web where
the light rocks, back & forth, holding me in a time
that's gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold

Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.

The figure in the hourglass & the body swinging
in the rhythm of its work.
The body reclining in bed, forgetting what it is, & who.

While the night goes on with its work, the stars
& the shapes they make,
Cold vein in the leaf & in the wind,

What are we but what we offer up?

Gifts we give, things for oblivion to look at,
& puzzle over, & set aside.

Oblivion resting his cheek against a child's striped rubber
ball in the photograph I have of him, head on the table
& resting his cheek against the cool surface of the ball,
the one that is finished spinning, the one

He won't give back.

Oblivion who has my face in the photograph, my cheek resting
Against a child's striped ball.

Oblivion with his blown fires, & empty towns...

Oblivion who would be nothing without us, I am thinking,
8

As if we're put on the earth to forget the ending, & wander.
And walk alone. And walk in the midst of great crowds,

And never come back.



Larry Levis