a reckoning by fire

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel…