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  • Elegy with a Stopped Knife in It, for Larry Levis
  • Theodore Deppe (bio)

The angel of the Lord grasps Abraham’s huge hand, and the halted knife glistens inches from Isaac’s throat.

The naked boy’s contorted mouth would scream if it could as his father’s left hand pins him to the rock: sunlight and shadow,

this world and the next, everything balanced a split second from the edge. The model Caravaggio used for Isaac

doubled as the angel, also naked, so Abraham, stopped in his deed, glares at his offspring’s mirror image.

Half vision, half nightmare, I’m reminded of the dream journal I kept in college, of entries in which my father—an absurdly

gentle man—strangles me, or else I’m trying to kill him, then sleep with my friend’s mother.

Fathers and sons—maybe I’d read too much Dostoyevsky, but I stopped recording dreams, having learned, I thought, enough.

In his poem “Winter Stars,” Larry Levis’s father breaks a farm worker’s hand on a tractor to stop the man

from killing his own father. The knife dazzles and briefly stops time, and it doesn’t matter that in real life

the poet’s father broke up a fight between two young men— Levis needed this attempted parricide

as he made up, as honestly as he could, a sort of afterlife for his dying father. Today, in the Uffizi, [End Page 99]

between glinting blade and throat, this poet I never met is present. Abraham’s thick left thumb immobilizes

the boy. The son is naked, and the angel. The bearded father wears a golden robe, red sash flowing from his waist.

So what if the farm workers were both young men? The battle is always between father and son.

Say that an angel caused Abraham and all his descendents to struggle with those who gave us life and those we helped bring into this world—

the knife gleams in dreamtime light. The angel of the Lord also commands us to stop. [End Page 100]

Theodore Deppe

Theodore Deppe is the author of four collections of poetry: Orpheus on the Red Line (Tupelo, 2009), Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2002), The Wanderer King (Alice James Books, 1996), and Children of the Air (Alice James Books, 1990). His work has received two fellowships from the NEA and a Pushcart Prize. Since 2000, he has lived mostly on the west coast of Ireland, and he coordinates Stonecoast in Ireland, part of the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program in Maine.

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