(for Lt. Col. Boyd D. “Buzz” Wagner)
It must have felt strange, letting the world fall from your hands—
that first skyward yaw pulling the wheels from the ground,
Johnstown shrinking to hills and smokestacks below,
and the wide sky, waiting with arms outstretched.
You were a boy with steel wings and quiet eyes,
flung far from home, drawing fire in churning skies,
and through that hellish heaven above,
eight names fell behind your streaking shadow—
planes broken and folded into silence,
your guns unstitching their borrowed air.
They called you the first ace—
because we saw who you really were,
the first to rise and not come back the same.
A poet once wrote, something does not love a wall,
and the sky is no different. The impossible
weight of metal surrendered to the wind,
pulling glory from the sky, the same weight
that breaks all our heroes.
And in the January cold, when you came home to Johnstown,
the town surged forward, and stood still for you,
twenty thousand strong,
lining the winter streets in silence and frozen breath.
Still, we carry your memory like a warm flame,
and lest we forget, it is etched in Grandview stone.
Even the sky remembers with each passing breeze—
airy whispers drifting over your grave.
And when we pass by and read your name,
we pause and glance once more toward the sky—
our hearts pulled upward, as if we might leave the ground
to feel what it meant to rise and not come back the same.
©Glenn Lyvers 2025
(“Buzz” is buried in Grandview Cemetery, Johnstown, PA)
after the battle
fields of mustard flowers bloom
deserters return
Fog hems the ocher backwater
like hoar frost on Georgia clay —
as the lodestar fades
against the breaking of a wailing sky,
rare winter lightning
flashes against a sea of granite
flags — the broken rear guard.
We are instant saints, lifting mother’s
ornate box — our scuffling boots
mimic the sound of dragging a mime
to the cadence of father’s walking stick,
its distant tapping calling her home —
a moment too solemn, too discreet.
Then suddenly a red dog appears
running wildly between tombstones,
its body pulsing to the rhythm
of its sagging tongue, and a girl
no more than seven kneels
with a glass of water, smiling
as the irreverent dog drinks loudly.
©2023 Glenn Lyvers
Now a poet in my 50th year,
I have settled on the mountain –
and I ponder the gentle streets,
the silent-blue church spires
and the listless Conemaugh.
Here, among the Alleghenies,
in a chair near the jukebox,
I spent a year sipping lager,
a parishioner to the vibrations
of a Johnstown congregation.
Each night someone is there
feeding the hopeful jukebox,
Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen,
as the thinning light births stars
over the wild onion side
of the mountain, reflecting
the rail-lights of the Inclined Plane –
and every evening someone new comes in,
and they are regaled with stories
about relentless rains and the flood,
and the way people were grasped
by the hands of the raging river,
flung sideways like flat rocks
skipping over water and water.
The words ring gently poetic
across the bar, with a voice
so familiar it feels like your own,
and it penetrates your very heart
as naturally as lightning seeks the ground,
and the artfulness fills me with hope
that someday I will write this well,
pierce as deeply as the poets at the bar.
We interrupt this message to inform you that some horrible thing happened to someone you don’t know somewhere far away, and our complete lack of respect for the victim’s privacy is brought to you by Xanex.
I turn off the TV, and the yellow dog
that never cared all that much for me
paces briefly past the loveseat
before jumping up to splay
her body across my aging legs
And I can’t help but feel her disappointment
that my legs are not my wife’s
and my feet have no pink slippers
and there are no balls of yarn
being wound by rhythmic hands
I think I must be getting a taste
for what my wife felt every evening
sitting in this chair with our yellow dog
and it really is quite nice, being chosen
to be a splayed upon companion
Trapped by a dog across my legs
because I dare not move a muscle
and risk disturbing the old girl
who spent the day pacing the house
looking in vain for a lost mother
I’ll never be able to explain
in terms a dog could understand
that I couldn’t bring her back home
and that they shut off the ventilator
before I was even allowed to say goodbye
This house is as quiet as clay
the furnace seems to have gone out
because it feels colder somehow
yellow dog is my last reason to live
and she isn’t breathing anymore
It occurs to me in these numb, small hours
that my wife would say, as a poem, it’s cliché
“but it has good bones,” she’d offer up
and I’d joke about “bones” in a dog poem
before heading out to the barn for a shovel.
My hound dog, Ellie, was abused
by a cop before I rescued her
from her rescuer, an abused puppy,
unable to restrain her bladder
all day long. The cop’s wife begged
the pound to reclaim her,
to save her from her savior.
That’s where I come in –
a hero – they say things like that
so you will take a dog home.
Still, Ellie couldn’t hold it
at my house either, she told me,
with a cowering whimper,
one need only care enough to listen –
and every night I carried her
down the stairs, out the door,
placing her gently on the grass,
where she proceeded to lollygag
for a frustrating minute or two
before doing her business –
it went like that for two months…
Eventually she made the trek herself,
and these many years later, still,
she wakes me – with a bark these days,
and in the stretch of these fortunate years,
my forties gave way to my fifties,
a slow event marked by back pain,
aching knees, stiff joints all over,
and for every one of those years,
Ellie has aged seven, they say,
always wagging her tail, graying
face unaware she is now older than me.
Soon, I will lift her into the bed
when she can no longer leap,
and I’ll carry her in my human way,
down the stairs when she tells me,
each painful step a gift to the old girl,
and I will set her lightly in the grass
where I have no doubt that she’ll delay,
sniffing the yard, stopping occasionally
to look up the mountain for a rabbit,
and she can take as long as she likes
because she is older than I am,
wiser in the way she quickly lives,
fully present every waking minute.
Ellie is now the rescuer, teaching
calm grace before the setting sun,
wagging her tail when I look at her,
the way she never changes, always
living and loving completely.
