John Levy and the Slavic Guitar Center, Bonnard Bathtubs, Copenhagen Hippos, and Cygnets Fishing in Seaweed

Levy's Accordion Straps

They cost $19.99 at Guitar Center. "These
beautiful one inch leather accordion
straps

from Levy's
exude
style and security." I can imagine

meeting an accordionist who asks
"Are you related to the Levy
who makes those great accordion straps?"

Before today, April 26th, 2018, I would've been
baffled. I would've said "No," but known
zero about what those straps

exude. I happened to discover them
like most discoveries, at least mine--by
accident. In Gregory O'Brien's poem

"A Genealogy" I saw the word spelled "accordian"
and wondered if that's a variant. Googling it
(and not finding "accordian," although O'Brien

is from New Zealand and maybe that's
how it gets spelled there?) I found the Guitar
Center site and decided to educate myself

on accordion prices, never dreaming
I'd also see straps for sale, much less
that my surname and the manufacturer's

would match! Yes, an
exclamation point. What's next? YouTube.
Angelo Di Pippo playing "La Vie En Rose"

on a French accordion, viewed as of today
614,267 times. I can tell his strap is definitely
not a Levy's. One viewer remarked (in broken

English) of Di Pippo "that old man
looks like my father. I am almost
start crying." Whereas Tomas Pressel commented:

"I am searching a known accordion song
i heard in the TV
but dont know the name. Its

a faster music with happy mood. It sounds:
Ta Ti Ti Ti Ti Ti Taa, (Ti) Ta Ti Ti Ti Ti Ti Taa;
Ta Ti Ti Ti Ti Ti Ti Taa, (Ti) Ta Ti Ti Ti Ti Ti Taa. . :)
Anyone Tips?"

Can't say I recognize it.

One more related search and I find this regarding
"Slav way of playing Accordion":

"Tracksuit, Hat, Chain, Accordion. Thats all you need.
A bit of vodka wont hurt."

After this detour I return to O'Brien's poem
a changed man.



Balneal


I look up this adjective: of, or relating
to, a bath, bathing or a bathroom. And I think
of Pierre Bonnard and how
often he painted his wife

stretched out in a bath-

tub (underwater). Balneary, an
alternate adjective, perhaps
works better, Bonnard's

nearness

to her
with just the water
between them. The water
she's
under, which

he
paints
as if it were her

attire. Colors

surround her and she, too, is

composed of so many
hues. She is at

rest

as he
works be-
holding her.



Copenhagen, Late July 2018



On our last day there I
took a train then bus out of the city to
Louisiana, the art museum while Nat

stayed and walked to the zoo, where he saw
hippos
fed by a man who threw

green apples into their mouths.

A crowd gathered to watch him pitch
the fruit so Nat couldn't get close
to take a photo with his cell phone.

I walked around a jammed
Gabriele Munter exhibition then
lingered in the less

crowded
Giacometti rooms.
Nat also saw fresh water

penguins. We joined each other at
the end of the day. The day before
we'd spent at Tivoli Gardens, where I took

hundreds of photos in the aquarium
while Nat wandered.
There were sparrows I wanted to photograph

as they landed in a delicate bush with small
deep red leaves, but I didn't want to disturb
the boy

feeding bits of a roll
to the peacock (which chased the sparrows
up into that bush).



Letter to Ken Bolton

Dear Ken,

There's a crow in your 
poem "Italian Chronicles--Birds of Rome"
(actually
more than one) and here's
your lines I recalled
in Copenhagen:

"A handsome kind of crow they have around here--
two-toned, black & a lighter chocolate-charcoal colour."

The two crows I happened
upon
near The Little Mermaid, at
a dock, were also two-
toned, but black and

silver. They walked
upon rounded rocks, dipped
beaks into water and
pecked
at squares the size of half
a postcard
made of what looked
to be asphalt that then they'd pick up
by their
beaks

as I snapped
photos. My son,
kind and at
a distance, sat at a picnic table on the other-
wise deserted dock since
it was early
and no one was there to
climb down into
boats. A swan
and cygnets

dipped heads into the
water through long green
thin ribbons (seaweed?) and

earlier I'd taken better
photos of them, which
was easy (that
is, getting "better"
photos) since
they floated inside or

near
the dark reflected and e-
longated
triangle of a boat's
hull

so visually there's more
going on
and off
and in. I kept
thinking of your two-toned
crow, wanting to show you these
two as they
leapt and flew
inches

above water-
smoothed
rocks
and I
crouched
and focused

while they held
trash
aloft
in silvery-
black beaks.

John Levy's most recent book of poetry is an e-book, On Its Edge, Tilted, published by otata's bookshelf in May 2018. Earlier books of poetry include Among the Consonants (The Elizabeth Press, 1980) and Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs (First Intensity Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in otoliths, Stride, NOON: journal of the short poem, Shearsman, Origin, CLWN WR, Plucked Chicken, and other magazines.

Howie Good in a Lost Country with a Sacred Kissing Stone, a Suicide River, a Saltmarsh Sparrow, and God as the TV with the Sound Off...

Journey without Maps

We must be lost. As the driver, I should really know where we are. We drive around to get a sense of place and pass payday loan shops, the bloated carcass of a dog, streets with holes. A teenage girl writhes on the sidewalk, her right leg splayed at a gruesome angle, her face contorted with pain. Huddled over her are a couple of friends whose idea of help is to just yell, “C’mon! Stand up!” I keep asking myself what is happening to my country. "If you see me,” the mass shooter says in the latest tweet, “weep.”

A Low-Hanging Heaven

What happens after you pass this border? After you enter this gate? There’s no police force to protect the city, no soldiers to defend it, no doctors to heal the sick. It’s a city that breathes nothing, just like heaven. This is the best place for us. You kind of get to escape. The inhabitants could be sleeping, could be dead, could be dreaming – I mean, drunk. Look at the stones. There was a stone that people would go and kiss. The stone melted. From kissing, melted!

Josef K

This part of the river is popular for suicide attempts. But if you go early, it’s not very busy. And, yes, Josef K lived somewhere in the area, debt-ridden, detested, abandoned by everyone, communicating only with pigeons in the park. Just up the street, I encounter a wild-eyed woman walking in circles. “Please help, please help, please help,” she keeps saying. The air around us swarms with particles of ash and smoke, as if bodies are constantly being fed into industrial-size ovens. In point of fact, modern homes burn 8x faster. There are so many fires you can’t even see the sky.

A Kind of Dream

And so there I am, wondering what the music of the spheres would look like from the perspective of a spy satellite, when I’m invited into the garish and absurd by a choir of young believers who want the God of rivers and streams restored, and why shouldn’t I be, as I’ve displayed more than once the misplaced confidence of a small bird – a saltmarsh sparrow or a piping plover – that crashes full speed into clear glass, and only to find myself in a kind of dream, where a few dozen of us aged children are getting off a tour bus to the dark corners of a cherry red dusk.

The Misery Index

Today I went looking for flowers for the funeral, but the shelves held only bottles, broken auto parts, a basket with plastic eggs. On the way home, I saw, bent beneath a cat’s cradle of clotheslines, a mom submerge her baby in a galvanized tub. Birds pecked at her face, her hands, making a noise like “Ha-ha-ha!” as if there was something in the situation that was screamingly funny. Maybe I’m a bad person – I just kept on walking. When I got to the corner, I happened to look back. It was like watching TV with the sound off, but you didn’t need sound to know if there was a God.

Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize.  His latest collection is I'm Not a Robot from Tolsun Books. He co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken  with Dale Wisely.