LIFE ILLUMINED AROUND DENISE LEVERTOV 273capacity in myself to see the world more freshly.” Meanwhile the older poet
welcomed in her writing an “energy and chained power,” plus her American
standpoint as against expatriates like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
After Williams died, Levertov composed “a kind of flower-sketch of Bill”
for his widow, Flossie, set by a river near his home.
Brown and silver, the tufted
rushes hold sway
by the Hackensack
and small sunflowers
freckled with soot
clamber out of the fill.Amid “crude industrial debris” these sunflowers carry “in each disk / of coarse
yellow” a smile, “almost / a boy’s grin.” She also had in mind the “Sunflower
Sutra” of another Williams protégé, Allen Ginsberg chanting his holy golden
sunflower “poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut
and smog and smoke.” Tenacious like sunflowers, her dogrose and buttercup,
oakshadow and summits of palm and pine resist a more and more denatured
world. That “flux and reflux” of celebration and dread, as she put it, kept her
voice sane.
In her mid-sixties Levertov moved to Seattle, living near a large semi-wild
park on Lake Washington. She continued to teach and help younger poets, while
working against war, nuclear proliferation, environmental wastage. When lo-
cal citizens “daylighted” a suffocated urban stream, she wrote how “fish and
waterbugs swim again in its ripples.” Her poem is posted there. Settling into the
terrain, she greeted its “generous” presence with crisp verse: dark silent woods
under “winter sunlight favoring / here a sapling, there an ancient snag, / ferns,
lichen,” the lake “always ready to change its skin / to match the sky’s least inflec-
tion,” and above all, the mountain.
Mount Rainier’s 14,400-foot volcanic peak south of the city, seldom fully visi-
ble, astonished her. Like Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” Levertov
in many poems, while never naming Rainier, records its changing aspects.
The mountain comes and goes
on the horizon,
a rhythm elusive as that of a sea wave
***The mountain absent,
a remote folk-memory