.	Just Blue Skies: poems for & after d.a.levy 1968 - 2001 an electronic chapbook by t.l. kryss Cloud Marauder Something like a silent child who is too heavy for holding sits in his lap, and he wonders what to do with it he moves from one end of the room to the other, noticing how the carpet moves its weight in front of his feet he puts his hand on the window and watches the lights go out in the bowling alley the night is so dark that the wind hurts its hands on the things it doesn't see later he lies down to listen to the snow blowing off the roof and sleep grows from his mouth like a slow forgotten word            First appeared in Cloud Marauder A Possible Circle In a sense, by burning the poems, 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.. Immediately, a clear case of unintentional confusion ensued between benefactors so that, to this day, we still may wonder who was given what, and rightly ask whether anything a man sets free to fire should be of use to leaves Like indefatigable shreds of meaning left standing on a street that's gone to seed and ruin, the elms and sycamores themselves do not make judgments and the questions we have gently posed seem only burning seeds of a thousand possible scenarios Children of Terezin Their pictures.. The outline of a small hand A collage of butterflies using various scraps of coarse heavy paper Drawings of a guard, litter-bearers The green walls of an infirmary I want to spend some time with these pictures as the father spends time with a son, with a daughter, so that years later they will not grow into strangers Because there was no time left to speak about 'the facts of life' they became these facts, suddenly, on paper I want to let these pictures speak (as if I could stop them) Let them have their time with us at last. . blurred water colors, circles of charcoal made to serve as suns * The World.. At least a little time.. A visit to the park, a walk through a museum Or just sitting close together, turning the pages, each with his own private book One doesn't have to fight their battles or explain too much Just spend moments Maybe then they'll be drawn slowly along the arc of the future Those colors. . Approachable, yet so chillingly distant like photographs like sunlight on a wall like people * Genesis. . They drew from famous prints of Van Gogh, and this irony was lost From a scarcity of flowers and such life as could be found Burrowing out from underneath the walls, from raw sky and earth From the faces of their teachers, from dull lusterless days But mostly they went inside themselves to draw these scenes * Hall of Mirrors.. A simple turn and immediately we are traveling in the company of kings who wore their crowns lightly so lightly the charters flowed from all they touched, boundaries vanished Kingdoms enlarged to a state of mind, and the armies went underground All that was needed was a word to bring them back, and they held onto the word, unswayed like a child with a pencil the good kings held their ground * Forgotten Agendas.. These are serious matters.. transformations and travels A man leaving his car in the desert and continuing on foot, his shadow growing longer as he disappears in hills Seeds living long after civilizations, in caves and recesses, beyond the transparence of necessity The visibility of flowers, unimagined blackholes in our daily light Exhibits at a childrens' science fair, a girl's smile, free and guileless As serious as laughter, the arguments for its existence.. serious * Our pictures.. If these pictures should remember us, I don't know what we would show them Let them see, I suppose, images of other children-- black-yellow-red-white-- excitedly raising their hands, burning with their answers Or flags at the All Nations Festival, snapping in a sharp wind No, don't expose them to flags Just show photographs of the earth from space, bright fruits and vegetables Remember them to bicycles lined up at a beach, paints of every color in the rainbow, a cherrywood easel so that they can have, in memory, the things it was not theirs to see * Life, Death.. The father stared so long and intently at the ocean that the sea-child asked, 'What are you looking at?' 'At a green village, my little one, at a cloud with a painted face.' Human Shield Excuse me for falling into your arms, when she raised the gun, there was no time to ask, no place else to go. Only now can I apologize for the confusion, the stains on your new shirt.. the embrace between strangers. Stand back, please, walk away through the streets and distances so I can learn to know you. I now realize that no one is innocent, not even the bystander, that the first instance of passionate abandonment was birth. Yes, It Happens.. Every Day.. Sometimes the suicide lives. 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. Fingers loosen, guns fall away and can't be bothered with, just now. 'Not so quickly,' say the drifting leaves 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 moment's delay turns into an hour, 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 to tear away from the palest strands of sunlight. Metamorphoses Every now and then a small, troubled 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 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. Overlooking nothing. Eyes, hearts. Abused, neglected 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 I would have wanted you to see 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.. strange how things turned out. 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. Nice day in the rain, d.a., 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 her colour television, rabbit's ears and all, into the street. Then in the landfill flowers wound up through the gutted console and swarmed beside the broken picture tube. I don't know why we let the doors of 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. . A new kid and his saxophone, 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. The Search for the Sound of Windchimes You've stayed away from the cemetery, knowing no song's there we do not bring, already, in our hearts Who wants to find the man can glimpse him-- 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 From the balcony of the small apartment where the bamboo windchimes hung, you take your final shot : the wind has stopped, though the space is bare, and done a slightly hopeless double-take, and put back something you, at least, would swear was needed to make sound Beret The poetry of d.a.levy 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. In some countries the young soldiers 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. But not his, not the poetry of d.a.levy. Today you have to go, like searchers of old, great distances, at great personal inconvenience          and some peril, to even catch a glimpse of what remains. Sunlight on the narrow road through mountains. 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.                To appear in Abraxas 44/45 Traveler He came to me the other night, or rather, I sought him out-- someone close to me had said. 'I stumbled on someone you'd like to meet' He was living in a Winnebago, on the outskirts of the city, but had just got into town Once inside the trailer, I seized the hunched and ravenous shoulders, looked him squarely in the eyes, and asked, 'Is it you?' and he smiled easily, without a trace of rancor, but I don't think that he answered right away His kid burst in, at one point, then his wife-- a young blond girl much wilder than himself She had rough edges and a mischievous streak in her, like fire under platinum    the boy bounced up into his lap, a squirming catch that steadied him He said that he'd been traveling, but mostly he was quiet, content to let the child raft the silences    not evasive or unkind yet it seemed he was not particularly excited over being found for a while less than thirty summers may have warranted. we both held watch across the darkened roads, the city in the distance distorted in the glow of radiation    even from those far perimeters. the clear light of a star, a comet's arc, had not been seen for years We knew him finally by the beaten wheels under him, the people who along the way had come into his life                To appear in Abraxas 44/45 Advisory at Riverside One elm in particular stands as testament 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 Just try to get a handle on the leaves that proposition skies like twisted hooks and grommets from that mass of weathered driftwood dragged upright And a cherry tree from Israel supplants an admirable emptiness, rising like a backwards- trenching wheel from the blue grass The pitch of an oak that's wasted time explaining rushes forward suddenly in apologetic manner for the grievances which only it perceives as tendered A poplar --twelve board feet of an angered poem    turned inwards-- guards the north view to the city In the old graveyard I've gone walking, 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 Scattered on the ground, acorns, leaftrash, twigs, and bits of bark reintegrate in travesties of trunks and branches What kind of tree was levy, really? Really, you don't want these woods to chose your weapons for you, or your poison, or a clear way out                To appear in Abraxas 44/45 SUITCASE At the airport the revolving luggage 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 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 apartment, 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 There, near the center of the empty lot, 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 The old apartment building on Wymore 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 The entire episode of Kent State 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 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