Living and breathing in New York at this moment are a number of Steve Levines: a plastic surgeon, a neurologist/academic physician, a lawyer, a dentist, and a journalist. But among all these namesakes there rises Steve Levine, a poet, our preferred Levine. Steve Levine's writing is collected in A Blue Tongue; Three Numbers, with Jim Hanson; Pure Notations (Toothpaste Press); The Cycles of Heaven; and also To and For (Coffee House Press).
Texting to tell you there are mutsus in your future: six just picked so crisp green with a kiss of russeting aromatic apples for you on this sad last day of late-summer peaches ah sweet peaches we mourn their passing impermanent abbreviated life! (it’s pretty wrenching) yet the mutsus await you got some Jupiter and Mars grapes too I can’t wait till you taste them they are plumb out of this world Blast from the Past A wack post-bebop take on “Tequila” originally by the Champs abstracts its vamps in Atlantic Avenue station platform depths mixing it up with uptown racket of the Lex bleet blat bleet, tequila! angular, overly insistent, totally bent the battered player over the battered instrument there’s an open case for change Note to Self Bummed by the morning thrum but unwilling to bend or bow today don’t take flak or yield to that shadow cast on the brightening path No can do OK? Truth Is it’s hard no next to impossible to write an ambling narrow in scope but boundless in feeling plainspoken seemingly off-the-cuff casual chatty aside or two tossed in for good measure poem that mentions any sort of gorgeous flora and not think of the work of Jimmy Schuyler Impossible! In spikes of grass a flower enclosed its mission unfold find a place for joy in this turd-strewn lot My Beautiful Enthusiast Unwittingly, the way deep water moves Thoughts of the darkness departed Or I thought of the darkness as departed I mean, I think the darkness departed I just looked at the data Day in and day out, idiosyncratic and fragile And read up on our passing impermanent life The every-word-under-the-sun edition It was not on the up and up Not straightforward or even on the level Now I say let there be lightness And silence without malice With no salve to apply or substance to ingest I have no flower-cluster abstraction to offer Lightweight I rise from my desk crack a window the slightest of breezes blows this poem right off the page
