Levis - The Selected Levis

My shadow stays indoors. I watch its step, and plan my tricks. This evening, the loneliness of disappearing acts! I think of poking my head through the sky, and, in those frozen pressures, of breaking into blood on a cloud. 2. The Magician's Ride to the Hospital Just now I noticed my arms, how they act without even telling me anymore, their preference for rain and razor blades, or for simply dropping off, like forgotten two-by-fours falling off half built houses. Now they grab at me like stubborn interns.

I turn quickly, mirrored in the dark glass of the ambulance, where already my face is wood, and painted to a doll's astonished whites and reds. Outside even the sky is shocked and darkens. 3. The Magician's Face One day all the smiles hardened; pals frowned like a firing squad and closed in. So I got lost in cafeterias, in the waiting rooms of airports, and tapped my fingers, until I was alone as a paper scrap under someone's heel. Then a funny thing happened.

I did a real trick sitting still while a plane roared off, I made a face like a single window smashed and bare with sky. 4. The Magician at His Own Revival Once I thought my mouth was a scar that disappeared like spittle being wiped off of a plate. So I shut up and sulked like last year's inner tube that hangs in a noose all winter through the rain. I sat through the chatter. I rose. I rose.

I called out like a blind man drifting on the drifting ice, for no reason at all but me, me. 5. The Magician's Call Our conversation frays like an old wire in the rain its thinness crackles. And there's a silence as the phone's hung up, as frank as someone's heels walking out. Outside in lightning, the palm trees whiten quickly and go bald as the fronds crack in the wind. 6. 6.

The Magician's Edge and Exit I've got my edge now as a lone end of a sheet quivers on the line and waits for the flick of someone's nail in the wind, and a lost pocketknife rusts on the railings, where the fence boards warp and blister. Now driving I whip the wheel back and forth as a frayed tire skids on the ice, and a back fence looms like flesh turned inside out in the noise. And I drift through it, suddenly air. 7. The Magician Ending After a while my lungs give like shale keeling off without a sound.