Andrew Levy

Excerpts from “On Being Incomplete—An Essay on Climate & Poetics

With images by Meri Karako

Rain is just six days away. The American people need to move on.

One of the greatest movements on Earth—the clouds shift into shape, spiral and race

as they spin across the oceans. A plume of orange.

Travel back to the safety of your reserve.

This is the first rain ever experienced over the Atlantic. It rains here almost

every day. Feeding the forest and multiple species of animals.

A gift from above.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience. A gift from space, for space, blocking its light completely.

The balloon will rise, straight up. The show begins. The balloon is still rising.

There it goes. It triggers more poetry.

Poetry is within the grasp of everyone creating every living thing on earth. It looks up from below

and down from above, created by nature and humans.

I’m turning on a dime. Educated by Public Television. The clients who walk through my door.

Sets the world on fire. It’s the first thing on our minds.

The perils of poetic interference. Something that goes to the heart of all of this.

The Ten Commandments. Why would we trade them for something else?

That’s not the way poetry operates. Long, long shifts in values over long, long

periods of time, etcetera? Do I really see a shift from that?

It takes a number of years. Another nail in the coffin.

It’s not a democratic experiment. All journeys originate in pools.

The fisherman follows the rising tide home. She is carried in the atmosphere. Weather

patterns swirl. All is not well.

The ground is deep orange. Far from the public glare, she’s who she wants to be:

someone whose life is both private and purposeful.

In my childhood, I believed anything was possible. There were few predators.

Human feces float in the water below. #It-wasn’t-me.

Food for thought. There wasn’t a chance I’d keep up. Who has time? Business

is booming. You don’t want to be who you are.

Time to whittle down. To rise again from the ground. You can say that, but

I can’t feel it. Some ink rhetoric an antiquated daydream.

Poets reveal themselves. Burn the nose. Form ranks and advance.

For the sake of selecting from nature the coming untitled. A zebra,

a hamburger, branding on the wrong note the right or wrung seeing.

It’s no longer possible to accommodate people who no longer read.

A line of immunity walks out.

Families never receive a bill. My memory was going downhill, I started to feel

gravity made it easy. Inconspicuous communities took possession.

Above-ground caves in the mountains. People died getting abortions.

You’ve never seen anything like it. It just doesn’t stick.

That is wealth.

You have to lean into it. The stakes are high. Oxygen levels are low.

Everyone is called. It’s avoidable.

This is a win-win situation. Over 600 women’s marches today in support

of women’s rights. One tree at a time.

All journeys originate in pools. 70lbs. of fish a day. The tide turns. The fisherman

follows the rising tide home. She is carried in the atmosphere. Weather patterns swirl. 21 pints

of milk a day. All is not well. The ground is deep orange.

That all happened.

Readers have to step up, too.

Individually and collectively it’s an open secret.  They’re egregious characters.

The whole eco-system.

Thinking is no longer taught, it is prosecuted. Nothing else

can even generously be called a plan.

Even when things go a bit wrong. Killing 99%.

I’m just happy. I’m going to go home and kiss my mom. Hug my kids.

Yeah, love my wife.

700,000+. Requirements work.

In perpetual expectation of the final onslaught 

that’s the piece to focus on.

The fiery pool in the asphalt.

These may be permanent. If so, all is lost. A ton of heat

used up by institutions. We do not have culture,

we have bodies in the public domain.

We’re lithographs. Impressions of what’s difficult enough to be

expected to win, to be successful. There is no absolute sense of continuity

in Popeye's capabilities. 

Popeye the Sailor.

Over at my house we’re dancing on the moon. Can’t sing a damn.

Everything sounds like steam.

We’re on the Milky Way. That’s the only god we know.

With you in my arms, call forth a miracle. It’s a miracle.

Whatever there is to find in there, it’s my fault. The secret that

he’s keeping from the rest of the world? It’s personal.

Adonai Eloheinu.

The dagger of an immutable income. The waterfall of soothing influences.

Nice thoughts. Mosquitoes and other insects.

This delightful wilderness.

The brow of its cascade begins to mellow. Luxuriant willows arch over.

But here, sparkling crystals filled with foam. Its confluence

thickens the air.

Cleavage-joints of social flowers compositǽ the remarkable mess.

Notwithstanding they are mostly small and shallow, the money-changers

are in the temple.

Impenetrable financial schemes and the individuals behind them

flicker on and off.

The dollars bristle with weapons. Their convalescence

will save them from destruction.

Money talismanically talks.

I already know what’s forgotten. The apparent is in reality

hidden.

The pillow pulled over one’s head. The speed of the ascent.

The lake lip it breaks into. Of tremendous death,

depth and wildness.

A Gulliver walking through the villages of the Lilliputians. The dead

buried with their heads pointing directly downward.

Not wishing to wake my parents abruptly, without a key to enter

my parent’s home; to pee in the drive.

And on the lawn. In various stages of decay the neighborhood

overwhelming the trees    every living thing    with death.

Nature has given beauty

for ashes.

A subordinate cone. The sky    black    with ashes    and smoke.

I believe nature has a soul—social media does not. Anything that

doesn’t sleep does not have a soul. Social media has game rooms, entertainment

alleys, corridors and exhibits, lounges; it’s a fireplace flanked by security guards kicking

your ankles revealing how much of the world depends on prostitution.

In art elements mix and combine, but they do not “melt”—they are not damaged

or destroyed in the process. Some elements may clash, some may contrast. 

A whole ensemble is an exercise in cladistics, an experiment in the evolutionary tree of life.

They reconsolidate discomposure. To think of palms and icebergs,

legs feathered down to one’s toes, small dogs loved.

To facilitate the movements of ecologists, microbes and invertebrates, soil experts.

The dry fragmentary snow.

Naïve modes of expression are sheer incompetence. Secret resistances

to theories of humourism is an extract of curiosity, an inability whose

exoticism of commodities, Khilim tapestries, fortresses and coffins, potted

palms and Persian carpets rob siestas of any meaningful agency.

Ruin my sonnets. Abandons voting rights.

Heaven’s love, never to be blotted or blurred.

My mission entails two aims side by side as well as alternately, one declining

for a time and the other in the ascendancy again for a time.

An asteroid is poised to strike the elite world, no one

can yet say precisely how large it is.

People no longer exist. Countless poems are disappearing. I can’t get inside

to turn off the anti-gravity floor.

I can’t graduate, I have no answering machine. I’m poor. I have no printer.

Roaches scatter when I turn on the lights. There’s no heat, the bananas freeze.

A water pipe bursts in the wall outside the bathroom. I don’t know anything

about plumbing. The landlord is a plumber that never shows up. The kitchen

is a small sink, a miniature gas stovetop, an ancient half-size fridge.

I live on pineapple. My life might still be anything at all.

It feels like it will never be totally done. My ideas seem to work against earning a wage. 

To help life to go right cements miles rowed our sweet breath missed. Slow down, walk toward  

the table grained to look like pine timbering. Today is given a low rating. A telephone of sand and pebbles.

In its vortex consciousness takes experience through the discount window. Nothing has to wait.

An embedded universe looks at you, says, look at me. Introductions walk over the ice

and crushed grasses.