Elegy on My Drive Home
for Larry Levis
When it rains on Las Positas Road,
the trunk of a eucalyptus there turns
blue — with a few blood-red streaks — but mostly
blue: a bright
hard cobalt,
& it just stands there, bleeding that blue,
among the other eucalyptus in their safe
camouflage of beige & brown —
& I remember something Larry wrote about Caravaggio,
how he painted his own face
in the decapitated head of Goliath,
& how Larry wanted to go up to it & close both eyelids
because they were still half-open & it seemed a little obscene
to leave them like that.
I planted a willow in a garden in Belgium when Larry died.
It grew by blue-painted shutters. I wanted that tree
to keep weeping there after I left for America again —
America who had lost Larry too — & I thought about that,
& about his two trees, lost somewhere
in Utah: the acer negundo, & the other one
whose name he could never remember.
So that now, when I drive home I think of those trees:
the acer negundo, the other one, & my willow.
Brother limitation races beside me like a shadow too, Larry,
so that now, when it rains, I take
another way home, or look
away from the Las Positas eucalyptus
standing there soaked & so
blue it seems a little obscene to leave it like that.
LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR is the author of five poetry collections, the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and the winner of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry (2020). Read more.
“Elegy on My Drive Home” first appeared in These Many Rooms from Four Way Books.
Italics are quotes from Larry Levis’ poem “The Two Trees.”