National Poetry Month post: Denise Levertov

Here's a poem from Candles in Babylon, one of my favorite Denise Levertov books. I hadn't picked it up in years, and it's maybe even better than I remembered. I have a very clear memory of walking around the UCLA campus reading this book (in the mid-80s or so), back when I still possessed the ability to walk with my nose in a book without putting my life in peril.

Somewhere I have a tape of Levertov reading this. I can hear her voice when I read it.


She and the Muse


Away he goes, the hour's delightful hero,
arrivederci: and his horse clatters
out of the courtyard, raising
a flurry of straw and scattering hens.

He turns in the saddle waving a plumed hat,
his saddlebags are filled with talismans,
mirrors, parchment histories, gifts and stones,
indecipherable clues to destiny.

He rides off in the dustcloud of his own
story, and when he has vanished she
who had stood firm to wave and watch
from the top step, goes in to the cool

flagstoned kitchen, clears honey and milk and bread
off the table, sweeps from the hearth
ashes of last night's fire, and climbs the stairs
to strip tumbled sheets from her wide bed.

                    Now the long-desired
visit is over. The heroine
is a scribe. Returned to solitude,
eagerly she re-enters the third room,

the room hung with tapestries, scenes that change
whenever she looks away. Here is her lectern,
here her writing desk. She picks a quill,
dips it, begins to write. But not of him.


Here's a link to Levertov reading "A Woman Alone" (scroll down). Hearing that recording, back in the early 80s, was what first made me seek out Levertov's work. There's other terrific stuff on this page, like Eileen Myles reading "Tuesday Brightness" and Frank O'Hara reading "Lana Turner Has Collapsed"!