To These Dark Steps

by Gabriel Levin

Gabriel Levin’s fourth collection moves from the Mediterranean world that has engaged his imagination for the last thirty years, to the sombre title sequence written in the shadow of Israel’s bombardment and incursion into Gaza in 2008. These striking poems and their prose commentary ( The Fathers are Watching ) navigate between the depredations of war and the mind’s need to disengage itself from its surroundings. The final section of this articulate and compassionate book is a fifteen-sonnet cycle dispatched from the shores of an unnamed island, which could be everyman’s abode, in search of what might lie yonder.

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2012

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anastasia Island, across a hump backed bridge from St. Augustine, re-reading Gabriel Levin’s new To These Dark Steps, which opens with poems written in Portugal, Greek and Italian Islands, and the Holy Land - a harmony of Paul’s tangled itinerary. Then 25 pages of poems and observation, within which are six poems with music springboards and a line of war in each:

After Webern

How to make sense of the unnerving
intervals played on the strings? And what if
the occluded cries rising from the debris of our enmity
mix with the atonal world
I’ve ventured into? I’ve muted
the bows on the hi-fi, and in a little while
I’ll have hammered myself
a sonnet-gone-awry that might
speak to our times. – Dear Anton, forgive me
for wrestling your broken, melodic
line to the ground this way,
but the skies, the skies
are pierced with wrath, as they would be
for you, stepping outside for air, the slug
spinning you to the dust.

p. 37

Anton Webern was killed by U.S. Army cook Pfc. Raymond Norwood “when, despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside to enjoy a cigar so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren. His only son, Peter, died on 2/16/1945 of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train.” Wikipedia

Gabriel Levin and I went discontinuously to middle, high, and graduate school together since 1961 when we were eleven. I know some of the vistas he evokes. David Lindsey and I, probably in the summer of ’62, set out in an inflatable kayak into the Sea of Galilee on a windy day, we found it difficult to make headway when we were ready to go to shore, and were picked up by a vigilant patrol boat, so, when a practically identical scene is portrayed on pages 18 and 19, I am bound to react quite differently from others, for the most part. I even bought a cheap tourist scimitar.
…

Remember the inflatable raft we’d brought
to the camp grounds north of Capernaum
Where we’d pitched our pup tent and paddled out,
our sights on Tiberias, even as the wind blew us
off course and nearly drove us into Syrian waters.
How did we ever get out of such a fix? A covey of peacocks
squawking under the palm trees greeted our bungled
expedition, it had all seemed so easy, the squat basalt city
within a boy’s reach, the following day we’d hike
to the Horns of Hittin. What did we know of defeat?
The sun burnishing the scimitar we’d coveted
in the market glanced off the miraculous waters.

But to:

Have you seen a single thing better guided
in its ignorance than my own my own heaven-
bound reading? Once, twice, the child I’d been
looked up and felt himself undivided
from the vast, interstellar space
above; now though it’s time to retire…

p. 62
we all respond identically.

Levin ends with a 15 sonnet cycle called The Wreath of Spume, each with its own rhyme scheme. The table of contents lists the titles (first lines) of these poems, which, in turn, make the fifteenth sonnet:

Not the beacon taking its own sweet time –
have you seen a single thing better guided
by its own light on the dark cape sighted? –
nor your hand sweeping the grass for a rhyme
parse the phrase that bears rephrasing.
What is it you hear whispered outrenoire,
sounds escaping under a jester’s cap jar
the spinner of yarns, nothing short of amazing,
one more night crossing, one more periplum,
for the books that speak to you of strange deeds
cast in the spindrift along the littoral,
east to west and back ever and anon
borne to the verge where no one heeds
the signs: strong winds out of the temporal.