Animals Are Passing From Our Lives
by Philip Levine
It’s wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.
I’m to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers
that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,
suffering the consumers
who won’t meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes
that any moment I’ll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife
discovering television,
or that I’ll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Nasrudin’s donkey eats poetry by Raj Arumugam
- English Poetry. Thomas Moore. From “Irish Melodies”. 44. She Is Far From the Land. Томас Мур.
- Алексей Жемчужников – Примирение
- English Poetry. Richard Hovey. John Keats. Ричард Хави.
- Commination
- House Of Silence by Philip Levine
- Алексей Плещеев – Знакомые звуки, чудесные звуки
- Private Ground by Sylvia Plath
- Limbo Under the Westway poem – André Rostant poems
- Poetry and the Power of Words
- From Behind The Lattice
- I am the earthworm, Lord of the Underworld by Raj Arumugam
- Alice Fell, Or Poverty by William Wordsworth
- Mariana poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- The Black Hawk War of the Artists by Vachel Lindsay
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Levine ( 1928 – 2015) was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012