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your old house in Davis Square looks the same−
I don’t believe in ghosts but here I am
doing errands in your neighborhood and
unwilling to stop thinking about you
suppose you hadn’t left Somerville for
the Northwest or hadn’t got sick and died
five years ago ah the poems you might
have written but that’s for those who loved just
your work−while I loved you as well so that
what’s in my mind is how right now I could
be standing on your front porch invited
for tea again ready to ring the bell
that is if you were here alive instead
I finish my errands go home you’re back
a week later though−this time in a dream
(“remember your dreams” you told us in class
so I try but often they slip away)
in this one you have something important
to convey some admonition or word
of encouragement perhaps what is it?
are you urging me to write more? calling
my attention to filthy politics
war greed wanting to know in your kind stern
way what I intend to do about this?
the next time I go back to Davis Square
it’s already close to Christmas−long lines
in the post office at La Contessa
holiday pies are crowding out pastry
I remember that you liked this season
invited friends to midnight mass served us
hot spiced cider and here I am again
on your porch now am I wide awake in
Davis Square or is this another dream?
anyway this time I’m here with Abby
a party Mary and Mark Rich Linda
former students now middle-aged some friends
you’re holding forth amused telling us that
old apocryphal joke: “Henry what are
you doing in here?” says Emerson on
visiting Thoreau in jail who responds
“why Ralph what are you doing out there?”
Carol and Denise by coincidence
are both visiting me on the same day:
acquaintances without much in common —
the New York Jewish princess married to
one of my best friends and the great poet
my first teacher who I still feel close to
by chance it’s also the day my brother
phones: “let me talk to him” says Denise in
a playful mood they’ve met a few times and
she does have this small streak of mischief “he’ll
never guess it’s me” and sure enough when
she says in her British accent “do you
know who this is?” my brother at a loss
casting about lights on some old friends of
my father — an English couple and their
children: “it sounds” he says “like a Dworkin”
“he thinks” Denise reports her hand over
the phone “it’s a Dworkin” and just the word
itself sends Denise and Carol into
shrieking hysterical fits that somehow
establish a particular close bond
that lasts until Carol’s illness and death
eight years later — they exchange “Dear Dworkin”
letters little elf statues they greet each
other “hello Dworkin” and are prone at
any time and in public to collapse
giggling this shared identity suits the
two of them in some mysterious and
deeply comic way it’s the kind of joke
most people greet with polite silence at
best and of course incomprehension now
Denise is gone too and of everything
there is to remember what I think of
is the way she and Carol came to my
house that day and how they laughed
Dick Lourie, a founding editor of Hanging Loose Press, was a student in the first class that Denise Levertov taught. His next book of poems, If the Delta Was the Sea, will be published in 2009. “Elegy: Among the Dworkins” is reprinted from Dick Lourie’s collection Ghost Radio (Hanging Loose Press, 1998)
Photo, top: Denise Levertov, 1957. Photo by Jonathan Williams.