Hey Phil.
They are writing about you Phil.
—you know good stuff
—the prizes
Detroit
and that poem where you said in past lives you
were a wild sun-crested fox being chased
by “ladies and gentlemen on horseback”—
you said you would wake up with the poem
ready
that it slipped untangled from a dream
all you had to do was sit up and write
the stage was a poem too
—even though most of us were too prepared
you preferred to joke before we went on
before the poetry light hit us on the face
it did not matter to you
—you just carved
chiseled
punctured
rotated
jitterbugged
and whirred past a distant gate
So I wrote this for Phil Levine, a good friend of mine
who had open arms and embraced me when I first arrived at Fresno State back in 1990.
And I had known about him through Gerald Stern, another professor that I had.
And I just really loved him, his poetry—miraculous poetry—that it seems like it's about ordinary things,
and somewhere in the middle of that poem you're going to levitate
and then come back to Earth at the end of that poem, and you're going to have to figure out what happened to you.
What happened in that poem and how it happened.
And he also was a great participant in the Chicano, Latino, Latina scene in Fresno,
which was very well a beautiful thing, cause we all were so inspired by him.
