Rachel Korn | Poems | CRAZY LEVI

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RACHEL KORN / POEMS / VILLAGE POEMS / CRAZY LEVI

Crazy Levi
Translated by Seymour Levitan

And no one knows what became of him, Crazy Levi,
who tied the roads
from Yaverev to Moshtsisk
to Samber to Greyding in a bow,
carrying always in his bosom pocket
his letters to Rivtshe,
his uncle’s youngest daughter.

All the houses in the villages knew him,
the road accepted his long shadow
like a horse that knows his rider,
and the dogs lay quiet in their doghouses
when the familiar smell of Levi’s flaring black coat tails
spoke to their hearts.

Women broken in the middle like sheaves
were in the field when Levi came by.
They toyed with him
and with a laugh that smelled of goodness, like dark bread,
they would say,
“Levi, you have no father or mother.
Why don’t you take a wife
like the rest of your people?
She would wash your shirt for you
and cook you a spoonful of something warm for supper.”

And Levi would look at their raw, swollen feet
and plow the brown field of his forehead
with the painful thought that was always present to him:
“Because my uncle wouldn’t give me his daughter for a wife.
I carry my heart around
like a cat in a sack,
and I want to leave it somewhere
so that it won’t be able to find its way back to me.”

And he would take a filthy piece of paper
out of his bosom pocket
and read aloud from a letter in German,
“An Liebchen!”-
and a red berry would blossom
in the dark moss around his lips:
Levi’s crazy, melancholy smile.

But after one long hard winter,
worse than any the old people could remember,
the small eyes of the windowpanes
looked for Levi without finding him
and the dogs pit their heads to the ground
and sniffed at all the tracks on the road,
thinking he might have come by

And to this day, no one knows what became of him.
Maybe the hungry wolves in the woods tore him to pieces
or maybe his mother who hung herself in her youth
missed her son, and a small, white hand
reached out to him from the dark attic of the old house.

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