Baby Villon

By Philip Levine b. 1928 Philip Levine

He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed

Because he’s white; in London because he’s black;

In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab:

Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back.

He holds up seven thick little fingers

To show me he’s rated seventh in the world,

And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger

In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood.

He asks me to tell all I can remember

Of my father, his uncle; he talks of the war

In North Africa and what came after,

The loss of his father, the loss of his brother,

The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread

Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye

So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood.

“Here they live, here they live and not die,”

And he points down at his black head ridged

With black kinks of hair. He touches my hair,

Tells me I should never disparage

The stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter.

Sadly his fingers wander over my face,

And he says how fair I am, how smooth.

We stand to end this first and last visit.

Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two,

No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders,

Kisses my lips, his eyes still open,

My imaginary brother, my cousin,

Myself made otherwise by all his pain.

Source: New Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1991)

Biography

“A large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland” according to Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, Philip Levine is one of the elder statesmen of contemporary American poetry. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Levine was born and raised in industrial Detroit. As a young boy in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he was fascinated by the events of the Spanish Civil War. His heroes were not only . . .

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