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Jim Levy Poem
Three of a Kind
For Caroline (Kay) Levy and Elizabeth Bishop
I could take certain scenes from your life,
a week in Paris, a fishing boat beyond the kelp,
cigarettes and booze and love of books
and swap them with the poet’s
but I won’t. They don’t match up precisely.
You loved men, didn’t go on binges
and possessed a decorum at odds with art.
Yet the similarities are there:
born three years apart, almost orphans,
her father died and left her helpless
when she was less than one,
yours soon disappeared and was
a subject that was never talked about.
You both survived bleak childhoods
being brave, and became young women,
smart, demure and shy, often sad,
and sometimes impudent and cagy.
(Did you really say that there
can never be enough defenses?)
She fell down in the gutter, drunk,
you merely slurred your words and bumped the table.
But both of you read widely and loved language,
words as words, on the page
or on the Scrabble board:
vernissage, frottage, montage.
You were women of a certain time,
of a certain kind, in tweeds and a fedora,
but with differing persuasions.
You succumbed to safety in an arid marriage
and she rose to the occasion to create
an art of formal and exquisite beauty.
She was Elizabeth. You were Kay.
Came the final years, dowdy, disillusioned,
your youthful manners turned to wit and scorn
and freshness to a weary flesh.
At this late date I confuse the two
of you with me and love with pity,
but pity isn’t love.
While I live the life you wanted,
I try to imitate her art but fail.
And yet like her I won’t fall silent, to the end.
Copyright © Jim Levy | Year Posted 2021
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Jim Levy Poem
Sitting outside with loose papers on my lap,
a gust blew the top two pages away.
It was a poem that contained some creatures
and the usual clouds and mists
and how fossils feel about mountains.
Like a Borges story, it contained the past and future
and how time distorts yet fuels our ability to love.
I jumped up and chased it down the road,
the poem containing metaphysical doubts
about existence, my own and yours,
and how everything doesn’t mean anything.
There was a buzzing hornet
and Diogenes’ mordant laughter
and it listed the questions that answer themselves
– Will I be born? Do I crave applause?
But it was gone, my best poem ever,
eaten by cactus or the wind.
Copyright © Jim Levy | Year Posted 2021
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Jim Levy Poem
Cynikos
for Diogenes of Sinope, 4th century B.C. philosopher.
There are all sorts of stories about him,
that he counterfeited coins in Sinope and had to flee,
that he lived in a clay wine jar through the hot season.
Yet he was honored by Corinthians
with a statute of a dog in Parian marble.
Some of the stories are too good to be true.
When Alexander asked him what he wanted,
he said please move a little, you’re in my sun.
He built nothing, never took up arms,
ambled around town in daylight with a lantern
looking for an honest man.
He said things to disrupt the public discourse.
“Women know if a floor is clean or dirty;
men walk on both.”
“Coins made by crooks look the same as coins
minted by the City; that is why we weigh them.”
Some called him parasite and saboteur, others
said he exemplified the virtues of a dog.
To prove them right, he bit his friends to save them
and he recognized the true and bristled at the false.
I feel compassion for this man born old
who objected to the status quo
and lived in opposition. But he was a Cynic
who was cynical; he stretched reason
to its limit and in the end it snapped.
He ate things off the ground
and masturbated in the public square.
So I conclude:
Although the gods made man a beast,
a wise man is a sweet and not a bitter fool.
Copyright © Jim Levy | Year Posted 2021
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Jim Levy Poem
I’m not some filthy ****
who calls your poems
a joke; I like them.
But here’s advice,
take it or ignore it:
You lard a poem with myths
that weigh it down; half
the young no longer know them.
In the next poem you introduce a talking door.
Do doors talk in Verona?
You use diminutives to excess,
little this and little that,
perhaps some little thing
is worrisome to you.
Virgil wrote of agriculture,
Lucretius physics,
you count our kisses –
a thousand, hundred, hundred thousand kisses kissed,
too many kisses to account for.
For you breezes are like overdrafts,
kisses coins, and lost investments
are like losing love.
You probably count the napkins after dinner.
As for metrics, I’m old fashioned,
prefer the epic beats and elegiac,
not the polymetrics and the tricky
new ones you employ.
You steal from Callimachus
and from Sappho too.
Worse of all you mix artifice and feeling.
It’s time you found a manly voice
to speak of love and pleasure as we know it, not from some book.
Copyright © Jim Levy | Year Posted 2021
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Jim Levy Poem
That night you came and dined with us
there was a wind, then soft rain.
My hair was dressed by Aemilia
who does it to perfection, and I wore no jewelry
except the brooch my husband gave me.
When I barked at you he laughed thinking
I was scornful of your youth.
I barked – and burned. The spark was there.
Some call it love, an arrow or an illness,
a misfortune not to be evaded.
I don’t call it anything but strange.
Why one and not another? Dear boy,
I said to you that night, love is not a wound.
You thought I meant to lure you with those words
and so, to end the evening, you read a poem by Sappho.
The sweet murmur of your voice
makes my heart beat faster.
One glance from you and I can’t speak.
A thin flame slides beneath my skin,
cold sweat trickles down my back,
I turn pale as dry grass.
Of course I knew that poem
and knew you left off both the start
and end of it, to hide what you were saying
and to whom.
Copyright © Jim Levy | Year Posted 2021
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Jim Levy Poem
It was a hot day and when I ran into Tu Fu
wearing a big straw hat I asked
“Tu Fu, how come you’ve grown so thin?
Are you in agony over one of your poems?”
Li Po
Copyright © Jim Levy | Year Posted 2021
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