POW#5 the Poem of Chalk

PreAP Poem of the Week #5

The Poem of Chalk was frosted with chalk; as we stood by Philip Levine face to face, no more than a foot apart, I saw the hairs were white, for though youthful in his gestures On the way to lower Broadway he was, like me, an aging man, though 40 this morning I faced a tall man far nobler in appearance with his high speaking to a piece of chalk carved cheekbones, his broad shoulders, held in his right hand. The left and clear dark eyes. He had the bearing was open, and it kept the beat, 5 of a king of lower Broadway, someone for his speech had a rhythm, out of the mind of Shakespeare or was a chant or dance, perhaps Garcia Lorca, someone for whom loss even a poem in French, for he had sweetened into charity. We stood was from Senegal and spoke French for that one long minute, the two 48 so slowly and precisely that I 10 of us sharing the final poem of chalk could understand as though while the great city raged around hurled back fifty years to my us, and then the poem ended, as all high school classroom. A slender man, poems do, and his left hand dropped elegant in his manner, neatly dressed to his side abruptly and he handed in the remnants of two blue suits, me the piece of chalk. I bowed, his tie fixed squarely, his white shirt knowing how large a gift this was 55 spotless though unironed. He knew and wrote my thanks on the air the whole history of chalk, not only where it might be heard forever of this particular piece, but also below the sea shell’s stiffening cry. the chalk with which I wrote 20 my name the day they welcomed me back to school after the death of my father. He knew feldspar. Born in Michigan in 1928, Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, he knew calcium, oyster shells, he the Frank O'Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation knew what creatures had given fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. their spines to become the dust time pressed into these perfect cones, He taught for many years at California State University, Fresno, and has served as Distinguished Poet in Residence for the he knew the sadness of classrooms 28 Creative Writing Program at New York University. in December when the light fails In 2000, Levine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of early and the words on the blackboard American Poets. Retired from teaching, Levine currently divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California. abandon their grammar and sense and then even their shapes so that each letter points in every direction at once and means nothing at all. At first I thought his short beard 35