A doctor contemplates Lenin's embalmed body; two angels flank an open chest during a heart transplant; a father's anger turns into a summer thunderstorm... Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing.
"This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the Introduction
Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.
A doctor contemplates Lenin's embalmed body; two angels flank an open chest during a heart transplant; a father's anger turns into a summer thunderstorm... Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing.
"This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the Introduction
Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.
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Overview
A doctor contemplates Lenin's embalmed body; two angels flank an open chest during a heart transplant; a father's anger turns into a summer thunderstorm... Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing.
"This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the Introduction
Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780966339536 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/1999 |
| Series: | APR Honickman 1st Book Prize |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In the Surgical Theatre
By Dana Levin Copper Canyon Press
Copyright © 1999 Dana Levin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780966339529
Chapter One
BODY
* * *
The way of compassion, in which the knights of our lord travel by night and by day, in the darkness of the body and in the soul's light.
[The Quest of the Holy Grail]
LENIN'S BATH
The future of the body-that's a purely political question. -DR. SERGEI S. DEBOV
The assistants lift him gently, gently. For a moment, the one lifting under his arms is in the attitude of an artistic sorrow-It is the Deposition, the taking down of the god. But then one of them wraps his limp body around him like a coat, marches around to the laughter, saying "Comrades, comrades-" He is dead, he is so dead he is nothing, he is a cloth to tend. When Debov walks in, disheveled, yawning, the assistants are all business, filling the vat with the secret fluid that makes him supple, that makes him clean. They are so tender, lowering him into the tub. Their gloved hands come away fleshy pink.
When they've gone, Debov sits watching. He imagines the sheath of bacteria he knows is there,incessant, biological, seeking a way in. They push and gather at every pore, but the flesh is sealed- His doing. Soaking in his vat of embalming fluid, Lenin looks restful, meditative, a high official in his bath in his dacha, far away from the controlled air of the mausoleum, the schoolchildren filing past him unblinking, the veterans who stand, expressionless. Debov watches as the germs crawl up and down the length of the body, scouring, sniffing for that open hole-the cold windows in the laboratory condense with his breath, and the flies lie hungry in the snow.
EYELESS BABY
Your face is smashed. It's a pot thrown down. You're mashed against a window no one can see, not even you, with your red wounds for eyes- I'm looking
at the teeth in the gum under the lip that isn't there, but I can't find your eyes, they're lost in your head, your nose a single nostril, your whole palate cleft from the bolt of being born, and now you're
arching your back, lifting your belly, and I can see the lightning coming out of your body, I can see the fire, the red pools in your sockets, the combusted seeds of an enormous light- Can I
crawl in them, look through them, I am so sure they're a door, if I pried into the fused lids I would find ice, stars, space with its cold fires spreading out beyond the body, if I could just shimmy through them, I would see what's inside us: the muteness, the blindness- because I don't know what it's like to be born without tears, because sighted I am blind to all that's invisible, because without eves I imagine anything:
gems, suns, whatever conducts the light.
BATHHOUSE, 1980
I'm seeing this through Richard's eves. The dark warehouse, the lights, the card to get in. The floor shiny with moisture, stains on the walls, eggwhite, yellow, the room sodden with cock-smell, excess, want. Sweat pours from the men as they smack and kiss into each other, fucking themselves out of suit and tie, lies to the parents, the boss, the wife- Spread out on mats, in doorless rooms, calling "Fuck me! I want to be fucked!" Don't you want to say this every day of your life? In the airshaft of your apartment building, in the cubicles of your office? Hoses to wash out the shit and blood. To be clean for the fucking, to be clean for the love. But can you see them? See the organisms stretching their tendrils? Into the cracks in the rectum, into the blood sluicing through the bodies on the floor? The building's a hothouse, a breeder, a nest- Feel the steam, the musk, how you stew unknowing in a petri dish, sowing the seed into the ass in front of you, grinding, grinding for love?
Who rent the sky? What cracked open to let this in? God with his beaker standing over the roof, pouring, pouring- This is the experiment, the laboratories haphazard in the trick's hotel room, the used syringe. Do you think it is the scourge, do you think you are the chosen? It will spread, it will spread. Into the backs of cars behind the football field, into the master bedroom in the suburbs. Can you feel yourself wanting, can you feel the love? Angels gather in the corners of the building. They do not judge.
BODY OF MAGNESIA
When the door between the worlds opened I ceased to be a ghost, I became the blood in my fingers in the veins of my hands I felt the world under my feet with its nails and its splinters I felt the salt the red water in the loam of my chest I was no longer a ghost, the vapors were gone, I was solid, I hurt, my wings could be broken, it was joy, I was living in it, I bled, I cried.
PAUL, ROOSEVELT ISLAND
The broken teeth, the ulcers, eating into the backs of people who have spent years sitting in chairs, in the green tiled halls of a hospital, trying to find a place to read, to think, to find, like Faye, a place to turn one's back and cry, to say, like Faye, When I cry I know it is Jesus crying, because Jesus is in my chest, he's crying for me, for my cut-off legs, he's crying
for you Paul, your feet bent like his, your bones stuck like nails through the flesh of your body, pinning you to a wheelchair for twenty-three years, your hands shaped like claws, skin-hard, tremoring, your shirt covered with egg yolk and coffee, your green pants stained with pus and shit- and the doctors,
gliding by you like sails, saying Hello, Hello, as you open the stink of your plaque-caked mouth and say Hello, you are beautiful, your soft eyes, your old man smell, the way you stick out your clawed hand to shake mine and say Thank you, popping chocolate in your mouth when we shared Easter candy, the dull brown saliva falling in torrents because you couldn't stop talking about poetry Paul
I see you in a wheelchair, on the weedstrewn windswept eastside of the island, the Pepsi sign curling over the banks of Queens, the clouds rolling black in from the Hudson, and you are saying Yes, now, I am giving myself up to the wind, I am a kite, I am a bird, I am weightless and beyond gravity, slipping up and diffusing, the million captive particles of me falling like mist over the hospital, because I am wholly mind, wholly air, I am dropping these wrecked bone shackles-
THE NURSE
There are so many now, perched on the headboard, opening and closing their wings like moths. The kidney is failing, and so many are arriving, alighting on the blanket, the pillow, falling around the comatose patient, settling in drifts against the paper gown. You've been seeing this, you've been watching them gather, you've told no one how the buzzing keeps growing around the bed. Now they crowd like a sea around the body, listing and pushing, the pulse of their wings lifting the current, you can feel it, the wind, on the hairs of your arms, making the lamp sway, ruffling the chart at the foot of the bed, they are hanging from tubes, perched on the monitor, pressing and pressing with a rising hum, you can hear it, the whirring, the din of their waiting, as they rustle and jostle and launch with a roar, a roar of angels swarming over the body, burrowing headfirst into every pore-
THE BABY ON THE TABLE
Everything is so dark under the baby, the table floats legless, a rectangle of light. Around it the angels are bending their doctoral faces, the baby unswaddled, undisturbed. See the kliegs bearing down on it, throwing up a stark light on the angels' faces, Mary seeping in to the black floor, dress vanishing in its deepening folds- She is a head, a moon, floating without expression above her naked child, the distance between them filling with ready, angels bending closer in a luminous cone- Will they do it? Will they dip their hands into the light? Will they fish out its heart, its lungs, its soul like an aspirin, lifting it bloodless from the milky white? Must there come a time, a line, a moment, a stanza where I say
On February 9th, 1965 I was slit through the belly without anesthetic to remove a gangrenous ileum? To make you look in the sterile bucket at the side of the gurney, at the blackened, pussed and stinking intestine, to tap your shoulder and look in your face asking Is that you? Is that you? Have you ever been hurt, have you ever been cut, is it only physical knives? Is this how I write about the baby on the table? By looking at a poor black and white print of a nameless Adoration by the School of Jan-Stephan Von Calcar? The print is so poor, is that an egg, a star through the trees in the distance, are they sheep, are they men, kneeling under its light? I can't tell if they are bending in lamentation or praising halleluyah, if the egg is a cross in a circle of light-when will they lower
the kiss, the fist, the sharpened scalpel, the angels are waiting, calm, impassive, the emanations of science in each white face- Can you help me sew up what they're about to open? Can you feel the chill of the table on your own small back? I keep looking at the baby again and again, outlined on the table by a membrane of shadow, how it looks up at the sky unconcerned-Where is the fault in this studied composure? Where is the crack in the gloss over suffering, is it here, at the base, where the paint is chipping, revealing the starkness beneath? Look in there, in the fissures between the blackened oils, and see the form of your very own cross, slipping through the vent in the hospital nursery and alighting on your chest your chosen star, marking you for the scalpels of light.
IN THE SURGICAL THEATRE
In the moment between the old heart and the new two angels gather at the empty chest. The doctors flow over them as winds, as blurs, unnoticed but as currents around this body, the flesh of the chest peeled back as petals, revealing
a hole. In it
the layers are fluttering-the back muscle, the bone, the chrome of the table, the tiled floor with its spatters of blood-
-fluttering as veils over the solid, fluttering-
The angels, gathering. Small, and untroubled, perched quietly on the rib cage, its cupped hands trying to keep in. Around them the bands of the doctors, hurrying-white flaps, white wings- the clicks and whiffs of the lung machine ...
Do you want it to be stars, do you want it to be a hole to heaven, clean and round-
Do you want their hands, dipping and dipping, flesh sticking like jelly to the tips of their gloves-
Hovering at the edge of this spot-lit stage, loathe to enter, loathe to leave, is it terror, fascination, the angels too occupied to turn their gaze to you? Go down,
go in. The angels perch on either side of the hole like handles round a grail. The bleeding tissues part, underneath the solid shimmers black, like a pool. The lights above the table enter and extinguish, the light of your face
enters, is extinguished, is this why you've come? The frigid cauldron that is life without a heart? I know, I'm tired of the battle too, the visible and invisible clashing together, the hands with the scalpels
flashing and glinting like flags and standards, fighting, fighting to the death- When they cut you down the middle you fled. The angels descended. You came up here with me, with the voiceless thousands at the edge of the curtain, hearts beating with ambivalence. Do you know if you want it? Is that jumble of spit and bone so worth it that you would go down again and be a body raging with loss, each beat of the heart
like the strike of a hammer, spiking the nails in, to feel, to feel- I learned this from you, Father, all my life I've felt your resign to the hurt of living, so I came up here, to the scaffolding above the surgical theatre
to watch you decide. Can you go on with this mortal vision? To the sword rearing up now in orange fire, the angels turning to face you poised at the hole's brink, their eyes in flames, in sprays of blood their wings beating against the steel wedge prying open the rib cage, is it
for you? Are they protecting you?
But you bend down, you look in, you dip in a finger, Father, you bring it to your mouth and you taste it, and I can feel the cold that is black on my tongue, it is bitter, it is numbing, snuffing the heart out, the heat, the light, and when will they lift the new heart like a lamp- and will you wait-
the doctors pausing with their knives uplifted, the rush of wings stirring a wind-
Continues...
Excerpted from In the Surgical Theatre by Dana Levin Copyright © 1999 by Dana Levin. Excerpted by permission.
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