Andrew
Levy has published ten books of poetry, including Ashoka (Zasterle
Books), Paper Head Last Lyrics (Roof Books), Curve 2 (Potes
& Poets Press), Values Chauffeur You (O Books), and Democracy
Assemblages (Innerer Klang). The Big Melt is forthcoming from
Factory School. His poems and
essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, including
Writing From the New
Coast (O.blek Editions), The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative
American Poetry (Sun & Moon), and
Telling It Slant:
Avant-Garde Poetics
of the 1990s
(Univ. of Alabama Press). He
is editor, with Roberto Harrison, of Crayon.
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Don't Forget to Breathe
There is always the danger The facts will fall and part
Repeat what cannot be altered Infinite and misunderstood
If I were the pronunciation of my name The miseries of human life, tension of nothing The softening of its existence, of yours Arrested through mute consonants Omniscient flood distributing a cultivated Fragrance able to be fairly complementary Or vernacular or made less arbitrary In this undefinable sweetness
It says to me – it is you who incorporate Domestications committed atrocities Doctrines of isolation, the perfect boring Controls of irresistible onslaught and slaughter Betray continuity and visions of speckled fish Calm and judicious views that housed All of nature qua cultural whims given and Completed – it is you who's dead
The perfect boring salutary onslaught Tension of consonants uncultured but cluttered Complementary arbitration
Continuity housed it is you The miseries softened flood it is you Who misunderstood it is you In this indefinable mumbo jumbo This yodeling humor
This tasty loyalty? This secret and secreted polis?
This innocent yet compelling Permanence
We Did It
Now Do you see the monster?
Here is my magic wand
Put it in the puzzle, por favor The territorial advancement Is one thing and its Realization another – the immediacy Of where the forms were Placed – they could starve But they wouldn't quit At what point can we withdraw? Intellectualized light? Practical conditions only find An impractical chair When someone calls me a poet Hegel's dialectic takes over Time is something I can pretty much handle As I please – instead of war We have art, let me come back to This thought a little bit later The essential loneliness I feel at the party The comforting spectre of it Our bodies so rarely concede The growing dominance, the suppression If that is established a series of rising Terraces turn to tiles An illiberal riot
Robbery and assault with precursor Ingredients – mommy has two heads, Petrified in all the multiplicity Bits of crystallized life – the stray ears Falling on them to establish a claim Snipping off the cluster by incapacitating Its author – hoping that America Gets a bloody nose becomes untenable, A kind of dossier, the absence of clothing To reveal the curve of its hip Become nonexistent – as neither Close nor distant, an inherent identity By no means satisfactory A written policy the forms could cave Stave off an essential comfort To be put back in its cage
All of this apace, ready for glitter A hidden bequest, the empty support That keeps the ugly together The pure human fact 2006 Drifting offshore To the extreme north The global American welcomes Its extreme figure The countenance comes into contact With the world above Organ of pure receptivity Nose and ear The peaceful public witness Of impropriety
If it blew up secluding Dissolution its sweet talks Busy at school The abomination kept in bed That inexplicable unbearable Immanent banker's life An inactive absence the disarticulates Empty all over the planet A pig that neither presupposes Or states something concrete The liver nobody wants to consider This always trembles That credentials of hands, feet, And buttocks Incomprehensible Virtually erode the epic solidity Of the materials at hand To accommodate or pirate power Or bitterness (Which leaves no mark) Or exodus – That cannot be untied It will kill you If you touch it
© Andrew Levy 2006.
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MiPOesias Magazine 2000-2006.
A Menendez Publication. Edited by Amy King.
