152
ALAN HELMS
This small, perfect poem heIps reveal the full meaning of Levine's
first title.
On the Edge
took us to "the edge of laughter," which is to say
the edge of the manageable, the supportable, the tolerable, the barely
reasonable.
They Feed They Lion
takes us over the edge into a nightmare
world of the wholly mad; a world of
charred faces, the eyes
boarded up, the rubble of innards, the cry
of wet smoke hangz·ng in your throat,
the twisted river stopped at the color of iron.
We burn this city every day.
The city is Detroit, the locale of half the poems in the book and the
symbol of a technology gone berserk, infecting the lives of its workers
like a cancer; a city of ammunition dumps, automobile graveyards,
"empires/ of metal shops, brickflats, storage tanks,/ robbing the air." it's
also a city of lonely men and women reduced to parts of themselves,
people whose minimal lives are so abraded by despair that it "Don't
matter what rare breath/ puddles in fire on/ the foundry floor. The
toilets/ overflow, the rats dance, the maggots/ have it, the worms of
money/ crack like whips, and/ among the angels/ we lie down."
Reversing the dehumanizing tendency whereby we treat people as if
they were their "statistics," Levine nominates the oppressed of this
refuse world as "angels"; and most of the best poems in this book are
ones in which he speaks in the depressed voices of those too bewildered
and dispirited to speak for themselves:
At the end of mud road
in the false dawn of the slag heap
the hut of the angel Bernard.
His brothers are factories and
bowling teams, his mother is the
power to blight, his father
moves in all men like a threat,
a closing of hands, an unkept
promise to return.
("Angels ofDetroit")
As
this section concludes, Bernard "cries to sleep." In another section
from the same poem "Nigger/ boy's crying in/ the shit house." In
"Saturday Sweeping," "Half/ the men in this town/ are crying in/ the
snow." "How much can it hurt?" asks one poem. For the people of
Levine's world, the answer is "More than we ever expected; more than
we thought we could bear."
And their repeated cries would be unbearable, except that some are
of anger as well as sorrow, refusal as well as surrender. The title poem,
the best in the book and one of the most powerful poems I've read in
