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 Contents | October 2003 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
The Lesson
by Philip Levine .....  Hear the author read this poem (in RealAudio)Early in the final industrial century on the street where I was born lived a doctor who smoked black shag and walked his dog each morning as he muttered to himself in a language only the dog knew. The doctor had saved my brother's life, the story went, reached two stained fingers down his throat to extract a chicken bone and then bowed to kiss the ring-encrusted hand of my beautiful mother, a young widow on the lookout for a professional. Years before, before the invention of smog, before Fluid Drive, the eight-hour day, the iron lung, I'd come into the world in a shower of industrial filth raining from the bruised sky above Detroit. Time did not stop. Mother married a bland wizard in clutch plates and drive shafts. My uncles went off to their world wars, and I began a career in root vegetables. Each morning, just as the dark expired, the corner church tolled its bells. Beyond the church an oily river ran both day and night and there along its banks I first conversed with the doctor and Waldo, his dog. "Young man," he said in words resembling English, "you would dress heavy for autumn, scarf, hat, gloves. Not to smoke," he added, "as I do." Eleven, small for my age but ambitious, I took whatever good advice I got, though I knew then what I know now: the past, not the future, was mine. If I told you he and I became pals even though I barely understood him would you doubt me? Wakened before dawn by the Catholic bells, I would dress in the dark—remembering scarf, hat, gloves— to make my way into the deserted streets to where Waldo and his master ambled the riverbank. Sixty-four years ago, and each morning is frozen in memory, each a lesson in what was to come. What was to come? you ask. This world as we have it, utterly unknowable, utterly unacceptable, utterly unlovable, the world we waken to each day with or without bells. The lesson was in his hands, one holding a cigarette, the other buried in blond dog fur, and in his words thick with laughter, hushed, incomprehensible, words that were sound only without sense, just as these must be. Staring into the moist eyes of my maestro, I heard the lost voices of creation running over stones as the last darkness sifted upward, voices saddened by the milky residue of machine shops and spangled with first light, discordant, harsh, but voices nonetheless.
Philip Levine's recent books include The Mercy (2000), a collection of poems, and So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (2002). He received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1995. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; October 2003; The Lesson; Volume 292, No. 3; 109. |
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