In the Dark: Meeting Larry Levis

by Christopher Buckley

In Memoriam: Larry Levis

佤邦

Larry looked up to the one blade of afternoon light slicing through a transom and said, in answer to one of my questions about his poems, that he was “trying to stop time,” casually, the way he’d say “Fresno” when asked where he was from . . . and that, to me, rang as true as a tree, or a shoe, made sense as clearly as a star burning through to this one blue dot in the outer precincts of the Milky Way.

I was treading water.  Thirty, I think, orbiting in the outer provinces of community colleges. What I understood about poetry would have fit on the back of a beer mat, space left over for a quote from Machado whom I had yet to read, who would later show me all that could be lost before the sea. Larry lit a Marlboro—we weren’t going anywhere—and, as indifferently as he tossed a match into the ashtray, told me I was a “good poet,” as if it were just a fact—that off-handed comment from him kept me going for years.

乔

What do we ever know?  All I had, I thought, was time. Fifteen years since Larry’s heart stopped, and no simile for that.  I have some letters, notes in the loop and ligatures of his hand.  Phil has his Parker 51, Bruce Boston says he still shows up in dreams. And even in Fresno now, everyone sits out at tables in the Tower District with over-priced coffees and cigarettes.  Now, I can put everything on a credit card—the aroma of Parmigiano-Reggiano and pecorino, logs of salami, rising from Piemonte’s Deli over Olive Street, anchoring me in the world.

Day after All Saints Day, I’m awake in the dark, thinking of Larry—irony moves right along . . . I’m too old to be a Romantic, too hard-boiled about the heart, but soft around the edges nonetheless.  He’d shrug his shoulders and laugh to hear me advising my cats about the most prudent courses for their immediate lives. Today, I half way know who we were all that time ago at the Biltmore in L.A.—the miserable job conference where I did not even apply, where I went just to see people like Larry, to wear my one acceptable sport coat and blend in along the edges of those apparently on their way. I felt like a utility infielder lucky to be called up to the major leagues, briefly, as they say, “for a cup of coffee”—lucky to have an afternoon to sift through some of what I didn’t know, lucky to spend a few hours with Larry who could care less for the posturing and unvarnished pretense of it all.

I’m still talking about dust—I can look back and see it swimming there where the sun cut in above the bar. Near the end, Larry was reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, wondering if our lives were enough, if they ever measured up?  What would we change if we could?  I can always single something out, but have little to complain about at this point—just time, and the variables of dust floating off toward the predictable dark.   I’m here near the sea with all the air I can breathe.  Almost 65, every long-lasting provocation of the spheres spinning above my head—and you, Larry, my friend, out there somewhere, still ahead of us in the light.