La Jolla, Thursday Morning, 9/14/23
My
late mother would’ve turned 100 today.
I
didn’t remember it’s her birthday this morning
when I began walking on the beach before 6:30. An overcast
day,
comfortably 63 degrees Fahrenheit. A stranger
(in
his late 60s) was strolling Gunther, his Golden Doodle, back
and
forth across a gleaming, little sandy stretch.
I
began this poem (before remembering Mom’s birthday)
thinking
it would be about the heron I saw. It stood
on a rocky outcrop above a narrow space between ledges,
watching
the waves below
deliver
small fish
it could see from up there and I
couldn’t.
And back in my room, I thought
I’d
write about how if I’d
seen
a hundred other herons the last few days
(I’ve
seen thousands of pelicans and seagulls),
this
first and only one
wouldn’t
have stopped me─for an hour, an hour
I
was lucky to have
alone with it. The roots of heron
extend
back to circa 1300: the word
has
changed as it passed through languages,
including French, Frankish, Old High
German,
Danish, Dutch, Old Norse. It’s
speculated
that the sound of the older
forms of the word imitate its cry.
Letter to Dave Read (5/14/21)
Dear Dave,
For the last two
weeks a pair of doves
have tried to
build a nest under the overhang
near our front
door. The female changes
position, occasionally, facing inward or outward, while the male
brings long thin
twigs he places
beside her before
flying off for more. Each time she
shifts, she knocks
twigs down. The other day we found
a broken egg near
our welcome mat.
For a day we
rejoiced when neither was up there─
Finally, they’ve figured
out how futile
the spot is.
But they returned.
Leslie put a clay pot up
near them, weighed
down with dirt and rocks,
hoping they’d
choose that. After two days they did,
which we knew from
all the dirt they’d kicked out.
A worm from
Leslie’s garden, she guessed, may have
been their goal.
Other news?
We’ve seen our
first rattlesnake and gila monster
of the year, no
scorpion yet. The word trivia
is longer than haiku, and should be. Trivium
is from Latin, a
place where three ways
meet. I just passed
a minute, unable
to believe my
eyes, because the word in the OED
after Trivet is Trivial, not Trivia. I feel as baffled
as those two doves
may have felt. There are many
definitions for trivial
in the OED, most of them
now obscure. One is
that in Natural History
the word applies
to names of animals and plants
(to distinguish
common or “vulgar” names
from scientific
ones). Should I insert a haiku here?
Or throw in the kitchen sink? I wonder what, in other languages,
is the equivalent
for a kitchen sink in such an expression,
I can’t imagine the Japanese saying, “Throw in the haiku.”
(5/14/21, 9/25/23)
1962, UFO Sighting in Arizona
Summer
evening, Andy, my younger brother, and I
in
the Phoenix backyard. I don’t know where
Mom
and Dad were. I was 11, he was 7. We both
saw a luminous oval hovering low in the sky,
pearly
silver and glowing. I’d never felt so alone
with
Andy. I hurried inside to call the police. A man
answered.
I thought he might say many people had been calling.
“What
do you want me to do? Chase it with an umbrella?”
He
banged down the phone.
In Fifth Grade, at My Wooden Desk
The teacher talked, up there in front of the
blackboard. I imagined both my hands
were about to be chopped off at the wrists, then
placed
on a long table on a white tablecloth
with 99 other pairs of hands. None of the wrists
would be bleeding. The high-ranking officer
behind the table would order me to identify my
pair of hands. If I could, on the first try,
I could have them back.
As the teacher
talked, I studied my hands, preparing
to find them.
Jasper Johns' Marmoset
died.
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
cried
at the burial, at Larry Rivers' house,
when the small monkey
was placed underground. Frank O'Hara
thought it was funny, according to
Steven Rivers (as told
in Brad Gooch's book), which Steven
thought showed Frank
"had a very sick sense of humor
sometimes."
They were all young (except for the
tree, and the late
monkey, perhaps, whose age Gooch
doesn't mention) and
the tree is probably still there,
though
perhaps "owned" by someone
else
who may have no idea of the monkey
genuinely mourned by almost all.
Out of the
Out of the fankle
of shadows the very red head of
a cardinal shows
up
first, as it walks a few inches over to the white bowl─
filled with water
and placed under the mesquites─
to drink. I had
looked up “fankle” moments before
I looked out the
window. It’s
in a poem by
Alison Flett, a poet I learned about
after she died and
Ken Bolton told me he’d be
attending a
gathering for her. The poem is “Arrival.”
As a verb, fankle
means to tangle or entangle. As a noun,
a tangled condition. Before seeing the cardinal,
I’d been thinking
about the word “shroud” because it’s
in a poem by
another friend, Joseph Aversano, and been recalling
the impression Madame Defarge made on me in high school, in
A Tale of Two
Cities,
when she says she’s making a shroud.
I’d been wondering
how I might use “shroud” in a poem and
then, in “Arrival,” read these lines:
the canopy of leaves like the dropped
shroud
of a no-longer-needed
Deus-ex-machina.
Flett was born in
Scotland and moved to Adelaide. “Arrival”
is full
of words I have to look up, like “thrang” and “sinders”
(both perhaps
commonly used in Scotland?). The cardinal
gone now, nothing
is drinking from the white bowl.
John Levy lives in Tucson. His most recent book of poetry is 54 poems: selected & new (Shearsman Books, 2023). He has also published a journal about living in a Greek village for two years (1983-85) entitled We Don’t Kill Snakes Where We Come From (Querencia Books, 1994) and a book of short stories and prose pieces, A Mind’s Cargo Shifting: Fictions (First Intensity Press, 2011).