The Darkening Trapeze by Larry Levis
Edited by David St. John
Graywolf Press, 2016
“Each thing’s like another / But not like it enough” is the axis on which Larry Levis’ posthumous collection revolves. Lurking within is an absence that can’t be filled, a familiar ache that will never go away. For Levis, there is never enough meaning left for meaning, and to prove it to the reader, he probes the hollow sore of modernity with consideration akin to that of a dentist intent on making you regret your negligent flossing. The Darkening Trapeze is a champion of the ugly, of the emptiness we often ignore. To describe it as enjoyable would be a disservice; The Darkening Trapeze is disturbingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that grabs the reader and demands attention with the grinning brushstrokes of Levis’ long clean lines:
Buddy you got no idea how fast it happens,
The tail gunner said to no one in particular,
And flicked the gunsight up with his index finger.
A moment later he turned into a wet rose
Like a modern-day Whitman, Levis is writing America, though it may not be the America we want to see. From the blooming rose of viscera that was a soldier to the overdosed boy “dead in a little swanboat in the park,” Levis’ work is stunning because it is a morbid inversion of what the reader expects the poet to provide: an answer, of any kind. Yet he displays the unanswerable with such sincerity, such honesty, such simple beauty that withholds idle consolation, that readers cannot help but go along with him.
Even within the collection’s intense disillusionment, there is always something driving readers forward. If not consolation, then at the very least a solid point: something we can grab and claim as our own, as real. Something that, in its exploration, can “mean nothing / and suggest everything.” Grand meanings may prove a facade, but Levis is able to do without them and signify the genuine, to explore a tragedy that is wholly human:
Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory:
Someone remembering her diminishment & pain, the way
Her scuffed shoes looked in the pale light,
How she inhaled steel filings in the grinding shed
For thirty years without complaining once about it,
How she might have done things differently. But didn’t.
How it is too late to change things now. How it isn’t.
His lyricism, though occupied with emptiness, also orbits around this point. How within our inequality and poverty, within his own cycle of amphetamines and withdrawals, if not in spite of then in tandem with our ennui, there is a single prick of light: it is always too late to change things, and it always isn’t. And though Levis himself may be gone, leaving behind an absence “clear and empty as heaven / once heaven has been scraped of any meaning,” still he offers that wonderfully gentle turn. The possibility of the genuine is placed like a jewel within the depths of his poetry: a pinpoint of light flickering on a darkening trapeze.
Daniel Heslep is currently a student who is writing and studying poetry at St. Olaf College. He does so in hope of one day writing and studying poetry in a more convincing manner.