"Our Reds"

Listen to Philip Levine reading this poem.


Let us bless the three wild Reds
of our school days. Bless how easily
Gaunt Vallejo would lose control,
the blood rushing to his depleted face
while his mistress in a torn trench coat
stroked his padded shoulders to calm him.
We'll call him Vallejo after the poet
only because he vaulted into speech
in such a headlong rush. (In truth
his name was Slovakian.) We'll call
her Lupino after the film star
because she was more beautiful
in memory than in fact, her cheeks
drawn over fine bones, her hair
tumbling down from under the beret,
hair we loved and called "dirty blond."
Vallejo would rise in class, unasked,
to interrupt "the tired fascist swill"
the stunned professor was giving out:
"The proper function of a teacher
is to inform the unformed cadres
of the exploited classes regarding
the nature of their enslavement
to an estate sold to their masters
of the means of production." Lupino
would rise quietly beside him to show
solidarity and to begin
her therapy. Two-ton Cohen would
join in flashing his party cards
for all to see and invoking
the sacred triads of Hegel. And we,
the unformed and uninformed, dropped
our pencils and groaned with gladness
to be quit of Aristotle's Ethics
or the monetary theories
of James K. Polk and stared into
a future of rotund potential
fulfilled. They are gone now, the three
—Vallejo, Lupino, Cohen—
into an America no one wanted
or something even worse, so bless
their certainties, their fiery voices
we so easily resisted, their tired eyes,
their cheeks flushed with sudden blood,
bless their rhetoric, bless their zeal,
bless their costumes and their cards,
bless their faith in us, especially
that faith, that hideous innocence.

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