Philip Levine's Life

Levine (8) describes this adult male's vitality as follows: "and though his vitality was then/a prison he had condescend to live/for these suspended moments." The cold water with which he awakens himself, the pitch-black skies before dawn, and "the cold at his back" as he waits for his bus "seven miles/from the frozen, narrow river" are his realities (8). His dreams are of the abjure that "held all the shades of red/and blue in its confluence shadows" (8). It is this never seen and never known world that this working firearm lives, tormented by the "hunger/for a different life, a lost life" (8).

He recognizes that the life that he has elect or inadvertently come to live is not the life that he dreams of or in which he finds solace. His angst is such that he no longer asks himself "where's he's going or where he is" because "he/ doesn't know and doesn't know/it matters" (8).

As he enters the factory where he works and inserts his timecard into a slot as he does every dawn, he hears "the moment/crunching down" or he potful choose not to recognize this moment because "either representation the day will last/forever" (9). He hopes that he will feel the "elusive calm/his father sp

oke of and searched/for all his short life" (9). He does not necessarily find this respite from his restless dreams, scarce once he is among the men with whom he works, both younker and old, he adopts the attitude of the satisfied, self-sufficient man.

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, pp. 8-9.

The poem moves to the necessary closing curtain of this man finding in the companionship of others like himself, whatsoever tiny thing that can make his life tolerable. on that point is no indication in the poem that he is hook up with or that he has a son. The portrait is of a man who, married or not, is solitary and isolated. He tolerates his life by moving back and forth from the beauty of the bright desert dream to the reality of the workplace where like others, he is doubtlessly trapped in a repetitive, unfulfilling job that pays the bills but does not satisfy his longing for meaning or for experience. He is the victim not merely of his own failure to seek mutation but also of a working class life in which the centerpiece of existence is the weekly paycheck which totally moves him from "every goddamn day" to every next blessed day. There is something inherently tragic about this unnamed m
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