This harpie with dry red curls <br />talked openly of her husband, <br />his impotence, his death, the death <br />of her lover, the birth and death <br />of her own beauty. She stared <br />into the mirror next to <br />our table littered with the wreck <br />of her appetite and groaned: <br />Look what you've done to me! <br />as though only that moment <br />she'd discovered her own face. <br />Look, and she shoved the burden <br />of her ruin on the waiter. <br /> <br />I do not believe in sorrow; <br />it is not American. <br />At 8,000 feet the towns <br />of this blond valley smoke <br />like the thin pipes of the Chinese, <br />and I go higher where the air <br />is clean, thin, and the underside <br />of light is clearer than the light. <br />Above the tree line the pines <br />crowd below like moments of the past <br />and on above the snow line <br />the cold underside of my arm, <br />the half in shadow, sweats with fear <br />as though it lay along the edge <br />of revelation. <br /> <br />And so my mind closes around <br />a square oil can crushed on the road <br />one morning, startled it was not <br />the usual cat. If a crow <br />had come out of the air to choose <br />its entrails could I have laughed? <br />If eagles formed now in the <br />shocked vegetation of my sight <br />would they be friendly? I can hear <br />their wings lifting them down, the feathers <br />tipped with red dust, that dust which <br />even here I taste, having eaten it <br />all these years.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/red-dust/
