John Levy


As a living person, I, too, am


qualified to say something
about the flowers. Not over-

qualified, I’m not that

alive. I’m nothing

like a James Schuyler, say, who in his poem
“May 24th or So” observes:

“A man passes
in calendula-coloured socks.”

There go the socks, left right, left right, down
just above the shoes and below the cuffs, re-

minding Schuyler

of calendula, whereas I─as a living person
also─if I’d been there

and looked away from his face down and down to

his choice from the sock drawer that morning (assuming
someone else didn’t choose his

socks for him, perhaps the night before?)─I

might merely have said,”His socks
are orange,” or thought of drinking orange soda pop when I

was so much more alive and
so much shorter, and the pop

mattered.



Note to Leslie Harrison (6/17/23)


A bird flies around inside a big mesquite tree I see
from my window as I think of writing you. It may be

a thrasher, I can’t tell. I can tell I’m thinking of you and
how you’re someone with whom I don’t have to walk on eggshells

when we talk, though the cliché makes me think
of who would have to walk on eggshells─the mother

or father bird? In a nest, how much would they walk?
In the 18th century, the saying was “to tread on eggshells.” A flag

with DON’T TREAD ON ME was first flown
on a warship in 1775 (the flag credited to William Gadsen,

from South Carolina, has a rattlesnake
coiled against yellow). A little strange to think

of that flag furling and unfurling in the wind and
I hereby withdraw that rattler from these lines, or

let’s make it a pretty garter snake you remember
from childhood, no threat about it, just color and the line moving—

here, mesquite branches are swaying, but not vibrating
wildly like windy yesterday when

the clouds looked even better than usual, their shadows
speeding over the mountains. This morning on a walk down

our dirt road, I watched two small
birds

(cactus wrens?) fly, together, from a branching
cactus to somewhere else (my memory

fails me) and they kept together as they flew
south, short

distances, staying within two inches
of each other. They made me think

about what it meant
to them, to be together. Ridiculous

to put down anyone as a “birdbrain.” It was quiet (about
5 a.m.). I didn’t hear traffic from the highway─

what I heard was birds calling notes and my
footsteps crunching. If I’d been wearing hearing aids

it all would’ve been amplified. . .but it wasn’t, it was
perfect. I thought I’d put more rhymes into this note for you

but nope, didn’t. 



Which Day


Which day isn’t full
of deaths? I’m speaking

for myself. I open

the New York Times to page 2 to
find the newest obituaries

and that’s usually after walking around

the yard, which inevitably has some old
corpse of a cactus and thankfully,

rarely, a rabbit cadaver or scattering of feathers.

Reading Schuyler this morning I’m reminded of Peter
Kemeny, a friend of his he

immortalizes (in “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”)

for “effectively”
throwing “himself under a train.” I Google Kemeny.

He was, according to the New York Times, apparently

successful as an editor (and, indisputably,
only 36). As for my father, he would’ve been one hundred

four days ago if he’d lived. He died

in 2013, when he was 89, died
on New Year’s Day. Wasn’t celebrating it, was

asleep or in a coma in a hospital and I wasn’t

with him, there was
no way to know he was so close to death after

four or five years of gradually

moving away from knowing who he’d been
when he’d been the brilliant student then

businessman then lawyer.

Etel Adnan said, in an interview
with Charles Bernstein:

“Speaking of death, for example, is that the end
of a particular life? Or is it the end

of a particular reality?”

I wonder how my father and mother would’ve
answered that, if we’d been sitting in their living

room; me, say, in my early 40s and them

their early 70s. The living room has since
been demolished, along with most of the rest of the house

where I grew up in Phoenix. The new owner
left the living room’s

fireplace. I learned how to build

fires
there. I knelt there.



Note to Ken Bolton (March 8th, 2023)


It has been several centuries
since my last poem addressed
to you, which I wrote

in that former life in a parallel universe.

If I believed in reincarnation I probably wouldn’t
focus
on how “rein” starts the word, then think about horses

and reins, and the traces, 

(made of gold) attached to fleas
in a flea circus (long ago, when those circuses
attracted audiences, and fleas might haul

an empty cart with minuscule wheels).

A flea’s
lifespan is from two to three months to
a year-and-a-half─there, if you were going

to look that up (were you?) I’ve saved you

a few moments. Now, in 2023, Leslie
recognizes each of the six Russian tortoises
she has cared for, for nine years, and can describe

the personality of each: trusting

or aggressive, shy or relatively
affectionate, etc. I wonder if the humans
who ran the flea circuses got to know their

performers that well. Changing

the subject a little, I love your book title: Sly Mongoose.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon in Tucson and a small
breeze causes bare mesquite branches to tremble

and as I looked out into the day a pint-size bird flew

past the bare branches as if
I were making a movie and had directed someone to release it
so I could place it there in a movie & this poem.

One of the smallest branches up against the sky

could be, if photographed
a certain way, a Giacometti woman though her head
would be too small. Size, that matters

when it comes to reincarnation. Next stop

for a flea’s
soul is an elephant’s existence, say, or, in reverse,
the whale spirit returns as a praying mantis.

Back to Sly Mongoose, though, to pull

an almost
random
quote (from page 24):

“The things made of soap
were really nice.”

John Levy lives in Tucson. His most recent book is 54 poems: selected & new (Shearsman Books, 2023), edited by Ken Bolton. Many of the poems in the book were first published in Otoliths.
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