John Levy


My Legs Sticking Down, But Above the Floor


Sometimes I feel like an antelope
strapped into a barber’s chair, looking
at myself in the mirror while the barber

balances a notebook between my antlers
and is writing the 11th chapter of his semi-
autobiographical novel. He reads it

aloud as he writes and I can’t talk
because I’m an antelope. If I could,
I’d praise his novel, not for its

plot, which I haven’t been able to
follow, but for the details─how often
he writes about hair and fur (and occasionally

antlers) and his many digressions about dreamy
childhoods. He had quite a few
childhoods, it seems. In the novel he ensconces the

antelope in the protagonist’s 
cushioned barber’s chair, which makes me wonder
how real any of me

is. At such times I focus
on my hooves, both of them on the ridged
steel platform above the beige linoleum.



Mouth and Doubt


I don’t know where I’m going to start. What’s
the difference? Once I begin I’m in, or is it more accurate

to say I’m out

of where I was and
don’t have to make perfect

sense, as I do want to─when

talking to another human. Do I feel free to
talk nonsense to trees? Sure.

I’ve been arguing with myself this week, but not

trees
or people other than myself (myself the tree, the

old man─yes, I’m 71 and

if my five-year-old self saw me he would surely
think, Gee, that very very old man over there

is looking at me for some reason and I hope he

doesn’t come and pat my head and ask what
I want to be when I grow up because I’d have to

lie, like I do to everyone who asks that).

Should I stop writing this poem now? Am I a
quitter? That old saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough

get

thinking about anything that will get them
not to quit.” I happen to see the word

“dogleg” and I am not sure I remember what that’s
supposed to mean, other than the obvious

one out of four (assuming the dog has four)

and should I look it up? What
will it mean to this poem? I think (before

looking it up) it is about what
happens to a path, like a fork in the path or

a bend. Being concrete, I imagined a physical

fork, silverware, on a dirt path,
metal, not plastic. More satisfying

to visualize a metal fork, in the light

rather than at, say, 1 a.m. when perhaps
it would be, at most, a gleam.

Okay, I’ll look up “dogleg” now. Yup, a bend

in a road or path, taking the path or road in a completely
new direction. I wonder if many poets

decide, in advance, to have four doglegs

in a poem. Doubt it. Doubt, a short word, deceptively
quick

with the noise it makes

as it opens my mouth and

purses my lips. The word causes
my tongue

to press against a location in my mouth
at the beginning, before

the word widens my mouth and finally

closes it. I know, don’t doubt, I’ve never
noticed before

what the word does to my

face. That part of my face that someone
named a mouth.

Who came up with the words
“mouth” and “doubt?” Were they

walking, by themselves, talking aloud or
thinking quietly? Were either of them

alone? Maybe both were? And how’d

it go, that first time? When they told
someone the word they’d created? I doubt

the listener applauded.

John Levy lives in Tucson. In 2023 Shearsman Books will publish his 54 poems: selected & new.

 
 

previous page     contents     next page