Los Toritos
When the little bulls, so-called, rained downFrom passing rainclouds like little bulletsUnexploded, wishing onlyTo scrub themselves away on their armored backsIn postures of surrender;When we, trainees, young men and boysWith imperfectly formed morals, flipped themOnto their sticky ridged belliesWith wooden spoons, then nudged themToward the drylands, only to returnHours later from evening drillsTo find them back on their backs,Pedaling crooked limbs like antique toysAbout to wind down, to snap shut the turnkeyDriven deep in their bellies;When the bony concrete verandahOf our bungalow and those of the empty adjacentBungalows from which wind radiatedWere speckled suddenly with dull poolsMarking the end of dry seasonAnd the pools swam with upended little bullsWho could not be made by any means to go on livingAnd even crowsStayed away from them, even the militant beady antsWho had risen from the groundWould not strip their remainsOr carry them awayIn opalescent flakes, no, well by thenWe had finished our drillsAnd were moving on. Done with mandatory tasks,Done polishingThe ceremonial scalloped hornsThat marked us for what we were,The little language we got by onWasn't much but was enoughTo carry us down the ravine,And solids and liquids had passed through usWhile the living leaves and flowers had stopped needing us.Dogs and pushcarts, whirring children, motorbikes, vansIn the rutted paths, there wasNo asking what woke usIn the rain, what morning today was,What destination. Some ornamentalPiece off our wrist had beenSnatched, a bracelet or timepiece,As we awaited our lift,Some piece from our pack had been sold off,Some other piece in us had misgivingsAnd went back inside where thingsOf questionable being go.
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- March 4, 2023
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“Los Toritos” from SOUND FURY: by Mark Levine.
Published by University of Iowa Press on November 16, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Mark Levine.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
“Whether lark as in songbird, or lark as in stunt, these skeptical, fabulous poems pluck pieces from Herrick and Pope like particulate matter from which the wonder of a poem inexplicably grows. Here is the poet Mark Levine at a great height. Sound Fury turns any easy notion of content and context inside out, executing the truth of our effortful helplessness. This book is a feat, a tonal fiesta, but not for this will it keep mattering to me, no—these songs come from somewhere deep underneath: if bawdy, then tender, full of woeful delight.”
—Sally Keith, author, River House
“Mark Levine has an extraordinary nose, taste, and mouth for lives low and abject, filthy talkers and doers. Sound Fury—its nouns pressed together loudly and furiously—is distinguished by its intense, continually revved-up virtuosity of voice, its absolutely right pitch, idiom, line cuts, and rhyme, and its large cast of ‘scavenging muckers.’ Levine’s language is unstoppably vigorous and his wit sly; his distinctiveness is his genius for a devastating inwardness. The postmodern disenchantment with the Anthropocene, that farce of human greed and conceit, finds its latest, most confident tracker here.”
—Cal Bedient, author, The Breathing Place
“Since his debut collection, Debt, Mark Levine has managed to reinvent himself with each new book. In Sound Fury, he turns to canonical poetry, which he has absorbed with love, distaste, and ambivalence, to embark on a chaotic, dream-like romp that puzzles and dazzles with its images and invented forms. The immersive landscapes of these poems might remind one of other fantastic and haunting worlds: environments such as Ian Cheng’s endlessly proliferating self-playing video game Emissaries, or Victorian fairy paintings like Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke. Sound Fury amplifies our conception of how the art of the past can be radically transformed and brought renewed into the present—and ultimately of what poetry can be: a realm of expanded possibility and a heightened feeling of being alive. This is an extraordinary book.”
—Geoffrey Nutter, author, Giant Moth Perishes
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