Practicing for Heaven

Julia Levine's poems continually land us in those places that are natural rifts or points of departure or beginnings and endings. It may be us at fourteen, when we are sneaking out at night, through the bedroom, to explore a furtive and fast love. It may be us in the American River in North Central California, after the winter run-off, wading in waters strong enough to take us away for good. It may be us watching comet Hale-Bopp, that old division between heaven and earth, where we live amid the dying, or soon-to-be dying, or the dying who have recovered, and the light above is a temporary smudge. Levine takes us to those moments, and she instructs us and herself to stay:............It would be easier for us to walk away, to leave those moments unattended. It would be even easier for us to falsely sentimentalize those moments, where after a near-death experience we vow to smell the flowers, to appreciate everything in life now that we have learned its value. Levine is intelligent enough to recognize the easy fallacy of that way of thinking, which actually dishonors the past. It's not that Levine doesn't appreciate the new and newly alive (how can that be after reading her poem "Fontenelle"?), but that she reminds us how important it is to love what has already been:....................... Levine reminds us that it is not enough to love the fire of a life, but its trace elements as well: the smoke and ash of what has already gone. At that moment, we may be then ready for what comes next.