Philip Levine
(January 10, 1928 – February 14, 2015)
COMING HOMEWARD FROM TOLEDO
We stopped at a beer garden,
drank, and watched the usual farmers
watching us, and gave a dull
country laborer a lift
in the wrong direction. He
giggled by the roadside where
we left him, pissing in snow
and waving, forty frozen
miles from home.
When the engine
failed, we stood in a circle
of our breathing listening for
the sounds of snow.
Later
just before the dawn of the
second day of a new year
already old, we found her
under white heaps, another
city in another time,
and fell asleep, and wakened
alone and disappointed
in a glass house under a
bare wood roof.
I called out for
you, my brothers and friends, and
someone's children came, someone's
wife — puzzled helpful faces —
saying "father" and "husband."
You never answered, never
heard, under the frozen stars
of that old year where the snow
creaked in great mounds and the air
bronzed from the slag heaps twenty
miles south of Ecorse, for you were
happy, tired, and never going home.
_____________________
Philip Levine
Not This Pig
Wesleyan University Press 1968
