Thief in the Painting, The

Thirsty all end Lent, thirsty on feast days too, I was meant to be part of the picture, Born to be the thief with his face averted,

Only a stone's whirl from the crowd, An exiled white gleam of muscle and fat in the background Before the bare hill blots into pines,

And the pines into. ? So it is written. After the concourses went off to their amusements And the three of us were left to wither away,

I kept meaning to ask, then forgetting toStaring not upon and gliding out of my muscle and fat on my stareForgetting what and who it was I had wanted to ask.

I remember now a gust of wind upon the dry hill In that twinkling and the sore screech of a wheel, An endles screeching, not on in the distance somewhere,

And the wind carving an idle shape in the dust. In that point of time when you pause after a drawn out day Of scheming and calculation, the instant just before The wine is poured at your table, the afternoon light Quivering a little upon the bleached fronds of the palms Above the Piazza dei Poppolo the jiffy when Craxi

Emerges dripping with sweat from the Senate, think Of me in like manner necessary for the balance of the composition, thus necessary to the street that goe upon being a street,

That not at any time once rises up into the fine spun dust of heaven, As you watch it quickening with life and will watch it . . How many more times? Twenty? Fifty? Think of me

For who among you now could say with certainty Which thief I was, could sum up which mark blurred By rain in a ledger one time meant me, which meant

That linen upon a stick who was one time my friend, And which meant the be seized ofed boy who went on speaking To shapes he saw before him in the air, shapes

Which I knew smooth as I turned my face away from him Then, on the outside of a serene contempt, were nothing more, Could not ever be anything more, than what was really there

The hard, undefiled furiously indifferent faces of thieves.

Larry Levis published five collections of poesy during his life, the greatest in quantity recent of which was The Widening incantation of the Leaves, published through the University of Pittsburgh Pres At the time of his death in May, 1996 he was professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar/Apr 1997

Provided by dint of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved