Words For the Axe

Words For The Axe



Each day I go further into the woods.
They fall before me like a road
Without stars, and without a curve.
It goes on the ocean, now.

And at night I fly so deeply into myself
I become still. I shine under the moon
Like the lost child you glimpse
Beneath the ice on the one day of the year
You decide to go skating.

Whoever it is that holds me, my one friend,
Is only a flowing of blood:
And blood spreads like branches in summer,
The leaves shading a house where the people
Sleep, and the birds keep their distance
From other birds, and it is the world.

It is the world— and where the ground was hard,
I helped bury its dead,
Hacking past rocks and roots until
I found a place, even for them.
There is no moral to my story.
From the outset, I gleamed, like a sea.


Larry Levis