Category: Notice

Between the Boathouse and Anne
Frank’s, I read a favorite Haiku
over and again, until the words
have no meaning. I listen
to the sounds. I hear the poem
as though told by strangers,
and when I stop to think it
through, the Haiku, about birds
riding southern autumn winds,
is like sipping a dry familiar wine,
over and again, its insistent
finish lingering on the palate—
the way bells resonate long after
they are struck by the hammers of monks.

In the Van Gogh Museum, I whisper
the haiku to the Starry Night,
and the stars become birds pressed
into swirling winds, and I become
the face of the North Wind, blowing
with puckered lips. When I whisper
to Sunflowers, its seeds become blown-
birds slowly exploding into a paper-sky—
a smearing yellow-orange blur
suspended in the creamy air—
possessing some intangible meaning
greater than the words themselves.

And long after I leave Amsterdam,
the haiku will remain on the wind.
It will be twirled by working windmills.
It will be the unseen passenger on trains
passing through blooming tulips fields.
It will be remembered by the red-light-
district-whore I bedded. It will undulate
forever with her pale body. It will be eaten
by café diners, and scrolled on bathroom walls
by mindless travelers who believe
they thought of it first.

And when I return, someday, to Amsterdam,
I will draw it from the river. I will roll it around
in my chops. I will chew on it, like a perfect fig,
eaten over and again, until it is consecrated
on my tongue—until it transfigures, forever
dissolving like a wafer in my mouth,
something placed there by a poet-priest
—a man immortalized by a haiku.

• Glenn Lyvers

In New York, between Adam Clayton Powell and
Frederick Douglass, there stands the Apollo Café.
People come from all over the world to listen to ear-java.
There are parades of angelic-singers gracing the pastoral-stage.
Sometimes they are practicing, like children sleeping,
waiting to die. A few have golden New York tickets.
That’s all well and good, except when the nostalgic-gates are
crashed by gorgons. They come scaled, looking for sirens,
slithering the musty building. They stare fiercely
at smoky-speakers mounted in the walls, unsure where
the heavenly music comes from. All over the theater
stone faces appear. The box-seats are filled with stone-men
smoking cigars, their hardened-hands frozen between the legs
of their screaming wives. Ushers are tipped over in mid
sentence. Chaos is in the aisles. Half the people are heavy,
leaded-stone-parishioners dutifully frozen in eternal prayer.
The others are confused, crying out in mournful panic,
What is happening. Brian what’s wrong with you?
What is happening. Brian what’s wrong with you?
Ohh, Lordy Lordy, have mercy,
Ohh, Lordy Lordy, have mercy.
The disgruntled ticket-master keeps admitting, and the doors
become jammed with frozen people, grey marbles with smiles
and ticket stubs. There is no escape for those inside.
Eventually the gorgons gaze at every soul.
Eventually they slither away, confused and disappointed.
Eventually only Ray Charles remains.
His voice can be heard echoing off hard surfaces.
Is anyone there?
Is anyone there?

• Glenn Lyvers

In southern Indiana
where the flat land
ironed by glaciers
begins to wrinkle into
stony foothills, there are
groves of walnut trees.
They stand together
in solidarity for miles—
their age dwarfing all
who behold the endless
sea of woody trunks
defiantly clinging to
the stony hillsides.

In November,
they drop their globes
like a storm of green baseballs
bouncing into piles, forming
a green carpet that extends
further than anyone can see.

When the tempest is over,
the trees fall silent.
They stand nakedly reaching
their arms into the sky,
like thousands of Rocky Balboas
celebrating the triumph
which lies beneath.

• Glenn Lyvers

Nobody ever asks why they call him The Boogie-man.
It’s because he has music in his soul. You can find him
playing the marimba in the zocalo on the evenings
he is not terrorizing children. When he is though,
terrorizing the innocent, he does so with style.
He peeks his head out of open closets, riffing,
“Booga booga, dittly dooga, boom boom boom.”

When the children cover their heads, and cry out for
daddy, he falls in tempo with their screams,
“Dadeeeeeeeeeeee”
“Fapity, dittidy, skittatee, deeeeeeee”
until there is a perfect mix of harmony on the long “eeeeee,”
and then when daddy appears, he slips back
into the darkness, still riffing in his head.
He pops out, and then into another room
with another bed.

At daybreak he changes into his sneakers again,
his “boogie-shoes,” and he taps his foot
while he plays the marimba, rolling his hips—
all day shuffling, riffing, foot-tapping,
until it’s time again, when he pops out to boogie-scare,
and boogie-harmonize with the screams of the
boogie-terrified. He is the “Boogie-man”
and he has music in his soul.

• Glenn Lyvers

On my desk, I found a pin
standing on end.
I can’t say I know
where it came from,
but I know about the angels.

On the heads of pins, there are
hundreds of angels, maybe millions—
who knows how many, but they are there.

Why angels gather, in vast
multitudes, on the heads of pins,
I cannot say. I know this, though,
when you have enough beings,
especially those with wings,
then games ensue—
and tag is the favorite game of angels.

They fly through the air, swooping
toward each other, delighting
in the freedom and the sheer speed
their glowing wings produce.

Their feathers begin to emit tiny flames
with thin trails of white smoke
while they speed along,
at speeds that defy physics,
at speeds that blur humans eyes,
at the speed of angels—
a wonder to behold,
and their laughter
rings pure,
so beautifully innocently-pure—
so pure that hearing it brings unguarded tears.

— OOO —

Even angels begin their games
with the choosing—after all,
in tag, someone must be “it”—and so
they stretch out their pale angelic-legs,
stacking their sandals like cordwood,
singing “Eenie meenie miney moe.”

One by one they are dismissed. It can take years
for the choosing to finish, but angels
have no use for time, and they delight in all of it.

At last, when there is but one angel left,
the one who is “it,”
there is a massive eruption of wings.
They blast into the air
looking like white, glowing, flaming, smoking locusts
swarming
in some blurry cloud of madness
only they can understand,

and in the cloud a chorus rises,
a chorus of laughing angels,
a chorus that makes God smile,
a chorus that brings unguarded tears.

• Glenn Lyvers

We are approaching
the day of reckoning, the day
when the souls are sorted,
when they are divided,
when children learn their fathers are bound
for some other place
they cannot go—
and until then, billions of souls are waiting,
frozen in their dying-places, invisibly littering
the streets, loitering in the hospital beds,
sprinkled thinly on the wooded hillsides.

In public swimming pools
there are floating souls.
On every highway there are souls
of truckers, with their hands
frightfully-frozen to absent steering wheels,
with knotted expressions of panic,
fearing for the children and families in cars—
cars bizarrely recycled into beer cans.

There are tribal souls, mountain-man souls,
hills carpeted with the souls of soldiers.
Krakatau souls are frozen like sprinters.
They are everywhere.

Somewhere, frozen,
your great grandmother reclines,
your great great aunt is covering her terrorized eyes,
your distant cousin is shielding a child with his body
and now, even in these recent moments,
people all over the world are dying,
becoming paralytic—they join
those multitudes of other souls who linger,
they wait for the day of reckoning,
they wait to be rewarded,
they wait to be free—to stir again
and someday, for those unfortunate bastards
who will be sorted into hell,
the frozen years will become
the years they long to return to.

• Glenn Lyvers