Featured Poem

FRESNO (to Phil Levine)

Jason Ward Boyte

I'm thinking of you tonight
Philip Levine; you're probably
Home now, eating dry yellow bread,
Thinking of TRUTH,
Not honesty.

I see you sitting at your desk,
Your thin wrists sticking out
Of your black raincoat,
Pen in hand.
You are writing down everything
Beautiful with the audacity
To trespass your eyes.

Mr. Phil Levine, writing down
Dusty towns street by street,
Pulse by pulse, on rumpled pages.

Suburban Communista.

You are the man of elegy—the world a field
Of fig trees stretched for miles.
The dry brown dirt, the overripe
Figs on the ground to rot. Each with
Allusions to other missed opportunities.

This is the whole world, Phil!
Take the cap off your pen! Write it down quick!
Your publisher called earlier, said Detroit is the
Same it ever was.

Fresno is a woman in the kitchen
Making the one dish she knows, the truck
Parked out front in the driveway.
You think of her, understanding
She doesn't need a name.
There's no need for explanation.
This is life, still.

Through the kitchen window,
The Sequoia mountains in the distance
Are hazier now through smog
And the gradual narrowing of the mind
That comes with age.

This town of juxtaposed barrenness and fertility—
Of ashes, trees. And
Still the fancy of possibilities:
To leave because you can.
Its texture like a stucco wall,
Warm as wool, the energy like the air cold
When you wake up outside.

This is a desert town.
This the whole world, Mr. Levine.
Might as well be.

To Phil Levine, Pulitzer Prize winner of poetry, and Fresno Resident.