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The Unknowable
by Philip Levine

Practicing his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge
hour after hour, "woodshedding" the musicians
called it, but his woodshed was the world.

The enormous tone he borrowed from Hawkins
that could fill a club to overflowing
blown into tatters by the sea winds

teaching him humility, which he carries
with him at all times, not as an amulet
against the powers of animals and men

that mean harm or the lure of the marketplace.
No, a quality of gaze downward
on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan.

Hold his hand and you’ll see it, hold his eyes
in yours an you’ll hear the wind singing
through the cables of the bridge that was home,

singing through his breath—no rarer than yours,
though his became the music of the world
thirty years ago. Today I ask myself

how he knew the time had come to inhabit
the voice of the air and how later
he decided the time had come for silence,

for the world to speak any way it could?
He wouldn’t answer because he’d find
the question pompous. He plays for money.

The years pass, and like the rest of us
he ages, his hair and beard whiten, the great
shoulders narrow. He is merely a man---

After all---a man who stared for years
into the breathy unknowable voice music
of silence and captured the music.

Suggestions for Writing
In an interview, Levine said of Sonny Rollins, "I love his sound." Specific songs by Rollins that Levine listened to are "Lover Man" (w/Brownie and Roach) and "East Broadway Rundown."

In the same interview, Levine also mentions his poem "Flowering Midnight" about a musician friend who became a "footnote" but was part of the enterprise of "living creative lives" like his schoolmates who became famous jazz musicians: Kenny Burrell, Pepper Adams, Bess Bonier, Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris.

Most poems about jazz sing the praises famous musicians. "The Unknowable" runs that risk in featuring Sonny Rollins as its focus; however, when Levine turns to the reader in the fifth verse, the poem brings the reader close.

Use a jazz performance and bring the reader into the poem, or use Billy Collins' technique of bringing the writer into the music as in "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice."

Works Cited

Hirsch, Ed. "Interview: Philip Levine" American Poet. Spring 1999

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