Pen wrote:

>I think Graham's angels are made almost entirely out
>of language, whereas Levis' angels are made of light.
>IMO Rilke is there in Levis' early work, but disguised
>by a more colloquial diction; later, Levis' language
>becomes elevated in a quite unamerican manner. Only
>the greatest poets, perhaps, can manage the high
>style.

    Yes, Graham's angels are so intellectual! (That's
actually one of her poetry's strengths for me--the sheer
audacity to be intellectual in these here American-poetic
times, yessir....)

Which is not to deny the incredible lightness of Larry's
angels, though, and when I looked back at his first three
books last night, I saw what you meant about Rilke being
there already. You're quite right, too, about the gradual
elevation (exaltation?) of the colloquial diction over
time and across the work. Your insight made me notice for
the first time how very Rilkean _The Dollmaker's Ghost_ is,
especially the ghost & spirit poems of its last section,
which are almost rehearsals for the angel poems of _Elegy_.
The last lines of "To My Ghost Reflected in the Auxvasse
River" are almost quoting the book's epigraph from one of
Rilke's letters to Lou Andreas-Salome (ending: "For, see,
I am a stranger and a poor man. And I shall pass"):

But I am a stranger, I will pass,
And always, when I bend to drink
>From this place, I come up with nothing, with
Broken water, a fine
Trembling in my hands,
Which must be you.

And compare the last section of "Blue Stones" (also from
_The Dollmaker's Ghost_) with the "so that" riff on walking
with the angel in "Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate":

(For listees unfamiliar with "Blue Stones," the "you" is the
poem's dedicatee, Levis's son, Nicholas)

But _you_? Little believer, little
Straight, unbroken, and tireless thing,
Someday, when you are twenty-four and walking through
The streets of a foreign city, Stockholm,
Or Trieste,
Let me go with you a little way,
Let me be that stranger you won't notice,
And when you turn and enter a bar full of young men
And women, and your laughter rises,
Like the stones of a path up a mountain,
To say that no one has died,
I promise I will not follow.
I will cross at the corner in my gray sweater,
I will not have touched you,
As I did, for so many years,
On the hair and the left shoulder.
I will silence my hand that wanted to.
I will put it in my pocket, and let it clutch
The cold, blue stones they give you,
As a punishment,
After you have lived.

(From section 4, "Like the Scattered Beads of a Dime Store Rosary,"
of "Elegy with an Angel at Its Gate," in the posthumously published
_Elegy_):

....
So that its melody might run through my limbs,
And loosen them, a lovely dust,

And sunlight through the windows of other lovers--
As yet unborn, their faces pressed against
The windows of the cells in the rush of the blood

Like faces pressed against the windows of a train--

Walk a few steps more with me,

Show me the house I must still be living in,
Where eternity was no more than my hand
Scurrying across a sheet of paper,

Kindling blent to the music of its hush;
Walk with me a little way past it, now,
With the wrong, other angel trapped in stone,

With the heavens behind you on fire.




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