Just Blue Skies:
poems for & after
an electronic chapbook
d.a.levy
1968 - 2001
by t.l. kryss
Something like a silent child
he moves
he puts his hand on the window and watches
the night is so dark
later
First appeared in Cloud Marauder
In a sense, by burning the poems,
Immediately, a clear case
so that, to this day,
whether anything a man sets free to fire
Like indefatigable shreds of meaning
and the questions we have gently posed
Their pictures..
The outline of a small hand
A collage of butterflies
Drawings of a guard,
The green walls of an infirmary
I want to spend some time
Because there was no time left
I want to let these pictures speak
Let them have their time with us
blurred water colors,
*
The World..
At least a little time..
A visit to the park,
Or just sitting close together,
One doesn't have to fight
Just spend moments
Maybe then
Those colors. .
Approachable,
*
Genesis. .
They drew
From a scarcity of flowers
Burrowing out from underneath
From the faces of their teachers,
But mostly they went inside
*
Hall of Mirrors..
A simple turn
so lightly the charters flowed
Kingdoms enlarged to a state of mind,
All that was needed was a word
like a child with a pencil
*
Forgotten Agendas..
These are serious matters..
A man leaving his car
Seeds living long after civilizations,
The visibility of flowers,
Exhibits at a childrens' science fair,
As serious as laughter,
serious
*
Our pictures..
If these pictures
Let me see, I suppose,
Or flags at the All Nations Festival,
No, don't expose them to flags
Just show photographs
Remember them to bicycles
so that they can have, in memory,
*
Life, Death..
The father stared
'At a green village,
Excuse me for falling
Only now can I apologize
the embrace between strangers.
I now realize that no one is innocent,
Yes, It Happens.. Every Day..
Sometimes the suicide lives.
Fingers loosen, guns fall away
'Not so quickly,' say the drifting leaves
A moment's delay turns into an hour,
to tear away from the palest strands of sunlight.
Metamorphoses
Every now and then a small, troubled
Overlooking nothing.
Eyes, hearts. Abused, neglected
I would have wanted you to see
strange how things turned out.
Nice day in the rain, d.a.,
her colour television,
I don't know why we let
A new kid and his saxophone,
The Search for the Sound of Windchimes
You've stayed away from the cemetery,
Who wants to find the man can glimpse him--
From the balcony of the small apartment
though the space is bare, and done
would swear was needed to make sound
Beret
The poetry of d.a.levy
In some countries the young soldiers
But not his, not the poetry of d.a.levy.
Today you have to go, like searchers of old,
Sunlight on the narrow road through mountains.
To appear in Abraxas 44/45
Traveler
He came to me the other night, or rather,
He was living in a Winnebago, on the outskirts
and ravenous shoulders, looked him squarely
but I don't think that he answered right away
She had rough edges and a mischievous streak in her,
He said that he'd been traveling, but mostly
yet it seemed he was not particularly excited
across the darkened roads, the city in the distance
a comet's arc, had not been seen for years
To appear in Abraxas 44/45
Advisory at Riverside
One elm in particular stands as testament
Just try to get a handle on the leaves
And a cherry tree from Israel supplants
The pitch of an oak that's wasted time explaining
A poplar
In the old graveyard I've gone walking,
Scattered on the ground, acorns,
What kind of tree was levy, really?
Really, you don't want these woods
To appear in Abraxas 44/45
SUITCASE
At the airport the revolving luggage
There, near the center of the empty lot,
The old apartment building on Wymore
The entire episode of Kent State
Cloud Marauder
who is too heavy for holding
sits in his lap, and he wonders
what to do with it
from one end of the room
to the other, noticing
how the carpet moves its weight
in front of his feet
the lights go out in the bowling alley
that the wind hurts its hands
on the things it doesn't see
he lies down to listen
to the snow blowing off the roof
and sleep grows from his mouth
like a slow forgotten word
A Possible Circle
he required new forms of energy from them
and bequeathed their questions to the skies,
the clouds, and hence to the trees
he tried so hard to emulate..
of unintentional confusion
ensued between benefactors
we still may wonder
who was given what,
and rightly ask
should be of use to leaves
left standing on a street that's gone
to seed and ruin, the elms and sycamores
themselves do not make judgments
seem only burning seeds
of a thousand possible scenarios
Children of Terezin
using various scraps
of coarse heavy paper
litter-bearers
with these pictures
as the father spends time
with a son, with a daughter,
so that years later
they will not grow into strangers
to speak about 'the facts of life'
they became these facts, suddenly,
on paper
(as if I could stop them)
at last. .
circles of charcoal
made to serve as suns
a walk through a museum
turning the pages,
each with his own private book
their battles
or explain too much
they'll be drawn slowly
along the arc of the future
yet so chillingly distant
like photographs
like sunlight on a wall
like people
from famous prints
of Van Gogh,
and this irony was lost
and such life as could be found
the walls,
from raw sky and earth
from dull lusterless days
themselves
to draw these scenes
and immediately we are
traveling i the company
of kings who wore their crowns
lightly
from all they touched,
boundaries vanished
and the armies went underground
to bring them back,
and they held onto the word, unswayed
the good kings held their ground
transformations and ravels
in the desert and continuing
on foot, his shadow growing
longer as he disappears in hills
in caves and recesses,
beyond the transparence of necessity
unimagined blackholes in our daily light
a girl's smile, free and guileless
the arguments for its existence..
should remember us,
I don't know what
we would show them
images of other children--
black-yellow-red-white--
excitedly raising their hands,
burning with their answers
snapping in a sharp wind
of the earth from space,
bright fruits and vegetables
lined up at a beach,
paints of every color
in the rainbow,
a cherrywood easel
the things it was not theirs
to see
so long and intently
at the ocean
that the sea-child asked,
'What are you looking at?'
my little one,
at a cloud with a painted face.'
Human Shield
into your arms,
when she raised the gun,
there was no time to ask,
no place else to go.
for the confusion,
the stains on your new shirt..
Stand back, please, walk away
through the streets and distances
so I can learn to know you.
not even the bystander,
that the first instance of
passionate abandonment was birth.
A piece of music from afar grows
through darkness, bends up fire escapes
and like small lights brushed from
heavy silk, pulls slowly, draws
against the heart.
and can't be bothered with, just now.
with their mimicries of loss and conflagration,
'there is something else you might consider..
it won't take long..'
and sunset's colours lay in
the first grey pilings of a bulwark.
a bridge of hours. A calendar's pages
wander down quietly, and the eyes which
only a short while ago stood so adamantly
prepared to close, will never again be able
cloud will tumble down, out of the night,
into the city, with a sliding, revolving joy,
and let itself go all over a streetlight,
trying to embrace a faith it has seen
only from afar.
Or how a confused butterfly will alight on
the colours of a poster moored to a dark
brick wall.
Along deserted sidewalks the tired wind
slows down and stretches slowly out
in pieces of paper, one by one,
as though methodically trying to
experience itself in magical new forms.
Newspapers, gum wrappers, the glitter
of a torn lottery ticket
spread like beautiful feathers
at the bottom of a curb.
living space. All come together
in the neutral dark, to arrive
at their understandings.
Stone may be light and healing.
Streets open and just,
broken glass always understated.
The city is not, after all,
such a terrible place.
TOMBSTONE AS REVOLVING DOOR
what happened to the mailman
who gave up writing because
he liked to eat. Let's just say
he found his way, and only starves
when he slips away from seeing..
Grains of joy or sadness get inside
the shell, and no one sees them
in the pearl years later, fused,
translucent. The wars, of course,
go on forever, but some of those
who landed in Da Nang are now the doves.
summers in the cold.
The trees grew soft as you,
without you, though they have
a few new rings like seasons
layed to rest in memory.
The old fat Tibetan lady heaved
rabbit's ears and all,
into the street.
Then in the landfill flowers
wound up through the guttered console
and swarmed beside the broken
picture tube.
the doors of our mind our mind close,
one by one, only to have them
crashing open sometime later
in those flowers.
On this day they're gone, too,
but there's a piece of music
I want you, if you could,
to listen to. .
laying it out, right here,
in plumes of fire. .
or just this sky above us..
would seem a little truer
if we could turn and read it
in your eyes.
knowing no song's there we do not bring,
already, in our hearts
unconditionally-- in a piece of old graffiti
slashed across the dark walls of an overpass,
in trees that keep on giving leaves
to dying streets
No evasion, this is real sun
he would have bet his time on
where the bamboo windchimes hung, you take
your final shot : the wind has stopped,
a slightly hopeless double-take,
and put back something you, at least,
does not appear in any anthology
I have ever seen. It is rarely reprinted
or remembered. No one quotes from it,
or learns from it, or judges it important enough
to show a child.
go to battle with poems
like a warm letter or a glowing photograph
tucked into their pockets,
just inches from the source of all confusion.
Somewhere they are read aloud
and carefully dismantled
to see what makes them tick.
great distances, at great personal inconvenience
and some peril,
to even catch a glimpse of what remains.
Loose rock to the right of you,
chasms on the left.
That's how he wanted it, that
was the way his life was
and its strength.
I sought him out-- someone close to me had said.
'I stumbled on someone you'd like to meet'
of the city, but had just got into town
Once inside the trailer, I seized the hunched
in the eyes, and asked, 'Is it you?'
and he smiled easily, without a trace of rancor,
His kid burst in, at one point, then his wife--
a young blond girl much wilder than himself
like fire under platinum the boy bounced up
into his lap, a squirming catch that steadied him
he was quiet, content to let the child raft
the silences not evasive or unkind
over being found for a while less than thirty summers
may have warranted. we both held watch
distorted in the glow of radiation even from
those far parimeters. the clear light of a star,
We knew him finally by the beaten wheels under him,
the people who along the way had come into his life
to an irrepressible and inscrutable
laissezfaire that has made its way
through fungus, drought, and a series
of ill-advised attempts to cement
the open crevasses
that proposition skies like twisted hooks
and grommets from that mass of weathered
driftwood dragged upright
an admirable emptiness, rising like a backwards-
trenching wheel from the blue grass
rushes forward suddenly
in apologetic manner for the grievances
which only it perceives as tendered
--twelve board feet of an angered poem
turned inwards--
guards the north view to the city
taking the pulse of all the trees
that have sprung up from those hills
of bedded memory, the mindful knolls
and shaded, sunlit alternating current
one-lane roads
leaftrash, twigs, and bits of bark
reintegrate in travesties of trunks
and branches
to chose your weapons for you,
or your poison,
or a clear way out
like a carousel of lost possessions
and horizons materializing, receding,
looming near; all bags wordlessly recognized
and taken until only one or two remain,
continuing in an inexorable circle.
Or the luggage handler at the bus terminal
picking up each parcel and unnecessarily
weighing it, almost quizzically,
before sliding it forwards with a quiet grunt
into the belly of the greyhound fuelling
in the dimlit circle of under distant stars.
The magician's trunk being moved to a warehouse
by the waterfront, separated from its key,
which may in fact, in time, prove worthless.
Cardboard grips, cloth bundles like medicine bags,
panoplies of decals from every place
you've visited and didn't see, autumn's
carrying case of streaming leaves.
And what about the suitcase
on the floor of the department,
delivered in some haste then unceremoniously
kicked to the center of the well-worn
oriental rug, waiting with unassailable
patience for the traveler who never comes,
biding its time as the late afternoon
light grows soft in a slow blue wave
and turns to darkness,
but the suitcase still prevails. .
whether bursting with the ordinary
or ingeniously packed with emptiness,
it becomes our baggage
like a conscience or a life befriended,
free and clear
Flowers for d.a.levy
where the death ship restaurant used to stand
(and hence its silver poly-vinylled jukebox)
grew a single remnant flower thrust
among weeds and rusted steel, siphoned
from the hard-packed dirt..
that flower's considerable silence, itself,
struck me as a kind of furious recording,
songs torn off in a delirium, one after another,
from the talons of a dream,
if only one could find the means
to understand them..
I approached on foot, danced
forward slowly, if you like,
got down close to broken bricks
and cinders, and lifted
the petals in my fingers,
parts of them falling apart..
rain's messages in bottles,
in blurred, smeared ink
and stringless guitars..
the unimpeachable singing of children
in the downs syndrome choir..
the very words to 'a plastic saxophone
found in an Egyptian tomb'
kicked back the carpet of
faintly graded wreckage..
the sky and the clouds across it
expanded, barely perceptibly,
like an eardrum dealt invisible,
incalculable blows
Windows
stands vacant, boarded up..
even the arch of the doorway
is a solid sheet of slightly charred
plywood.. high up, various sections
pried off what used to be windows,
exposing the darkness inside
for the poseur it is :
no more than the absence of light--
not a presence. It always amazed me
(perhaps I am too easily amazed)
how gradually windows, anywhere,
are replaced with cardboard, duct tape,
odd fragments of lumber.. not overnight
but a process-- piecemeal, random
reactions. For some reason
I'll never quite get, Wymore
wasn't Savannah. The courts and police
pushed hard close to Hayden,
and what did he find?
'The North American Book of the Dead'
Back up near Euclid
where there should have been at least
a stretch of psychic freedom,
'The Suburban Monastery Death Poem'
flew out and consumed him.
Maybe peace promotes terror,
and terror sheds light.
In any recounting these two streets
must loom large.. they crept
into the eyes and mind when nothing else
may have been happening, succoring
boredom with the insane beauty
of the ordinary. There were visions here
literally plucked from the way snow
blanketed curbstones, leaves
on the wind swarming through streetlights,
republics of rain viewed and inhaled
from the tower of a peeling windowsill.
Suicide Days
eluded him. The resignation
of the king, a psychic victory,
the last helicopter beating waves
through trees as it lifted
from Saigon-- he never heard the news.
The Berlin Wall's dismantling
occasioned moments of regret
because he didn't live
to bring it. The spectre
of a hundred burning oil fields
played out and passed by without him.
By dying, by becoming the ether's
charged, dazed molecules,
he missed by thirty-three years
the air strikes at New York--
his door to the future closed.
Who can say what Kant or Nietzsche
would have made of Nissan,
flowers born of faxes, CNN?
We never had the benefit,
in the intervening years, of seeing
'The Book of the Dead' extended
to include new swirling permutations
at loose in the world,
but when we look inside
or just beyond our shoulders--
on the simple strength
of light and echoes--
he continues to be there
