The Elegiac Image: On Larry Levis’s “Winter Stars”
BY MEGAN PINTO
One of my favorite poems is “Winter Stars,” the title poem of Levis’s fourth collection and an elegy for his late father. The imagery of winter stars recurs throughout the poem, deepening its two absences: the father himself, and what goes unsaid between father and son.
Levis saw the image itself as elegiac. Building upon Pound’s definition of the image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant in time,” in an essay titled “Some Notes on Grief and the Image,” Levis expounds upon time, writing that “it is exactly that instant that passes . . . The image draws on, comes out of, the ‘world of the senses’ and, therefore, originates in a world that passes . . . Could it be, then, that every image, as image, has the quality of poignancy and vulnerability since it occurs, and occurs so wholeheartedly, in time?”1
What does elegy do but grieve time’s passing? In order to preserve the ambiguities of all that has gone unsaid, Levis subverts traditional narrative and avoids prolonged exchanges between father and son; instead, he creates movement through time by juxtaposing the stillness of an image against anecdotes or abstractions of his father, evoking a complicated grief.
The poem begins in the poet’s childhood. Note the stark contrast between the title image (“Winter Stars”) and opening scene: the poem’s first stanza takes place in daylight, in a warm season, amid a display of masculine strength and power:
My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Rubén Vásquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace,
Across the throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.
Although the poem opens with a clear anecdote about Levis’s father, it quickly turns toward Rubén Vásquez and his knife. We spend a long time with the fruit knife, both an omen of pain and vision of grace. In these opening lines, Levis establishes a key strategy for creating drama without narrative conclusion: extending the experience of the image while glossing over the moment of confrontation (“. . . It was like a glinting beak in a hand, / And, for a moment, the light held still / On those vines. When it was over . . .”). Because the father’s interiority is withheld here (as it is throughout the poem), the image of the knife takes on added emotional significance, exemplifying the vitality, danger, and surprise of this particular memory.
The rest of the poem takes place in starlight. We experience another stark juxtaposition, this time between the brief daylight of childhood and the much longer night of adulthood. Here in the third stanza, Levis first establishes the poem’s key image—winter stars:
Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.
The fruit tree of long ago has been replaced with the bare branches of an oak, through which the stars can be discerned. The stars begin to take on a familiar metaphorical role: that which we yearn for, far off in the distance; that which fills us with awe. Because of the juxtaposition between the opening stanza and these winter stars, these lines do not fall into cliché; they show us plainly how what was once ripe has now withered, though the light, and life, still persist.
This kind of light, hazy but persistent, foreshadows the father at the end of his life. In the poem’s fourth stanza, Levis continues to contemplate the stars:
It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them.
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it ever gave him.
Now if we try to talk, I watch my father
Search for a lost syllable as if it might
Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now,
The word for it, he is ashamed . . .
If you can think of the mind as a place continually
Visited, a whole city placed behind
The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end—
As when the lights go off, one by one,
In a hotel at night, until at last
All the travelers will be asleep, or until
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk
Is applying more lacquer to her nails,
You can almost believe that the elevator,
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.
I stand out on the street & do not go in.
That was our agreement, at my birth.
The stanza subverts traditional narrative—we never fully see Levis and his father in the same room, trying to speak. Instead, the image of the stars, of the light, continues to change, moving us through time, and creating narrative cohesion, the celestial light becoming man-made: “If you can think of the mind as a place continually / Visited, a whole city placed behind / The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end—.” The lights in the hotel go off, one by one, as the lobby glows and we ascend an elevator that opens upon starlight. This ascendant, redemptive image is the closest we get to the heavens in this poem, which is otherwise grounded in earthly endeavors. Here is where the stanza, and the speaker’s imaginative journey, end, not reaching toward the heavens, but standing out on the street, silent and unmoving, mirroring his position under the oak tree. Levis confides:
And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.
I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.
Perhaps the reason why Levis avoids cliché while writing about the stars is because he does it so unsentimentally. He acknowledges the limitations of language, of his own image: “I got it all wrong.” It is here that Levis breaks the poem’s prolonged silence, and begins, for the first time, to address his father directly:
Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind,
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—
Which may be all that’s left of you & me.
Sound, touch, and temperature enter the poem’s sensorium, grounding us in the particulars of the present moment (“. . . a small wind / The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again—”). Until this point, we only see a winter landscape—the pale haze of stars and bare branches of an oak. But now, we begin to experience winter more fully. I can hear whispers of winter in the stanza’s melodic, insistent consonance: where, wind, wrist, wakes, which. Levis builds this music and reflects on his own actions in a confessional monostich: “When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.” Then he turns, one last time, toward the poem’s key image:
That pale haze of stars goes on & on,
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape
On a black sky. It means everything
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold.
Cold enough to reconcile
Even a father, even a son.
In this final stanza, the stars take on their most startling configuration: “. . . laughter that has found a final, silent shape / On a black sky.” This image of the unmoving, static stars represents the narrative conclusion of Levis’s father’s life. But what is laughter’s final, silent shape? A mystery. Levis turns back instead toward the irrefutable cold.
Although the image is often associated with sight, Levis demonstrates that “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” need not be visual. The prevailing detail in this final stanza turns away from the visual and toward the physical and sensory. The celestial realm is not only lit with stars, it’s cold beyond human comprehension. This metaphorical pivot (or twist) by Levis dramatizes the distance between the father and son, raising the poem’s stakes to that of spiritual survival: “Look,” Levis implores, invoking the imperative for the first time in the poem, and the cluster of lexical (cold / Cold) and syntactic mirroring (“Even a father, even a son.”) transforms the poem’s final music, our ear doubling back, returning to contemplate that which cannot be directly seen, but felt.
In the end, Levis’s version of winter allows for what the stars alone cannot: humility. What we see of the stars connotes light years, which extend far beyond human time. It is this coldness that shocks us back into this human life, where we can respond to life’s passing.
1 Larry Levis, “Some Notes on Grief and the Image,” in The Gazer Within: Essays on Writers and Writing, eds. James Marshall, Andrew Miller, and John Venable with the assistance of Mary Flinn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 117.
