John Levy


None of these words

were born in this paragraph, a neighborhood known for margins, silences, childhood sulks and fantasies, teenage desires lingering until the final word has arrived. None of these words have left this paragraph like the legendary rats abandoning a sinking paragraph as it is about to sink through fathoms of darkness to where experts say it is always night and is always snowing, though the snow is made of particles of uttered words sifting down from the world up there. None of these words are like the rats that are not legendary either, except that (1) the teeth of the words and rats’ teeth never stop growing, (2) some rats and some words get pretty big, and (3) rats have been known to laugh. Meanwhile, in the deep sea, vampire squids shaped like umbrellas have persimmon-colored skin and it is rumored that occasionally a few of them hum a melody pale violet octopuses have titled “Fathoms.”

Ikarus

Ikarus is the name

of a make of bus, in Poland, and
learning that

I think of Midas here, in the U.S.,

and how it’s
odd

to name things for myths that

don’t exactly
end well.



Self-Portrait as a Self-Storage Unit

In a long row of them, with corrugated metal
pull-down doors and a single light bulb
with a chain pull. There’s a tide pool

in one far corner
with sea urchins, crabs, little fish, other forms

of
life.

The metal box in the other far

corner

has no lid and a white swan
is painted
inside it.

In the middle of the room is a pyramid of
books
all the way up to the ceiling.

In front of that, to your right
as you face into the unit, is a small altar
to my mother

and on your left, a small altar
to my father. A little wooden stool
is between the altars; that’s where I sit,

or stand, when I close the door. When I open

the door
I hide

behind the pyramid.



Monarch Butterfly
                                for Joseph Salvatore Aversano

does
a
Monarch

ever

get
so

old

or
tired

or
both

(   and
            more     )

it
feels

it’s

lugging

its

wings

from
a

sunny

past



Virginia Woolf

On the last day of her life she left

her home. She’d written Leonard
two versions of a goodbye, each

beginning
with the word

“Dearest,”

and each (they’re similar)
thanking him. The first

thanks him for giving her

“the greatest possible happiness”
and the second, “complete happiness.”

She told him that morning, before
he left the house, that she’d be doing

housework

and then going for a walk. She did
walk

in her fur coat, and with

her walking stick, out
through their garden, past

the church

and

down to the river, where
she walked further, picked

up a large stone

that no one describes

(at least as far as I know)

and put it in her pocket
before she walked

or jumped

into the fast flowing river.
She said in her notes

she was suffering from a disease, going

mad, hearing voices, and this time

wouldn’t recover.

A word lived on

a small farm, at first. Then left, though often thought of the farm. It set off on paved roads, sometimes slept in the weeds near the roads. The word was recognized frequently and sometimes appointed to important positions in sentences. It sometimes found safe places to leave copies of itself. Sometimes it wished it could be in a book all by itself, solo, on every page, sometimes near the top of the page, or more frequently in the middle off to the side or down by the bottom in a corner.

John Levy lives in Tucson. His most recent book of poetry is Silence Like Another Name (otata’s bookshelf, 2019).

 
 

previous page     contents     next page