Unending Without Being Transformative
by Francis Levy
Hugh and I shared a number of interests and life passages, and one of them was karate. We both practiced traditional Japanese karate at a dojo called Seido. Karate is a discipline which is lengthy and time-consuming. Hugh became, after many years of training, a fourth-degree black belt, a Yondan or sensei. He went to many weapons classes, which may seem strange for such a gentle man. He once said to me, “karate is unending without being transformative.” I quickly made it my mantra. That may sound critical, but it’s like his poetry in its unquestioning simplicity.
I came to see Hugh several months before he died. When I went over to his bed, he whispered “what are you doing here?” I don’t think he knew who I was. I replied “Osu!” which is the greeting that karateka invoke when they see or acknowledge one another. To that he replied “How’s Kaicho?” Kaicho means grandmaster and he was talking about Kaicho Tadashi Nakamura, our teacher. Plainly the dojo permeated to the very depths of Hugh’s being. He once also said to me: “I always thought I would die before I left that place.”
It must have been in the locker room at Seido that I proposed a project to Hugh. He and I would both undertake poems and report the results to each other each week. I wrote “Francis Levy’s ‘Divine Comedy,’” which would appear inExquisite Corpse,and Hugh produced “Days,” one of his last poems. Hugh was a meticulous individual with a highly evolved self-editor, resulting in what some might term minimalism. “Laconic” is the word I prefer, along with “premeditated.”
Consider this last version of “Days,” the poem alluded to previously and note the numbers by the lines. The selection that Hugh sent in on December 31, 2014, for example, reads “that I do not think of that I did not think on” and is followed by the number 31. That or some combination of the entry with words before or after was his submission on that particular day. Hugh was a graduate of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University where he studied mathematics (B.S.), and also poetry under the Objectivist Louis Zukofsky. He then studied theoretical physics at the University of Minnesota (M.S.). Rigor was his style and his observations, at least in this last poem, constitute a kind of “periodic table.”
At the end of our project, he wrote: “thanks for suggesting this. The inferno was divine. And necessity is the mother of invention, I guess.”
| DAYS | |
| So…what was the best day of my life? | |
| Spring Sunday afternoon: new poems sent out, | |
| Jayne water-coloring on the grass before the botanic cherry blossoms | |
| respite from the rage of art | |
| Afterwards the Brooklyn Museum show | |
| whose content I have forgotten | |
| Or it is just another day—Friday afternoon but long ago— | 7 |
| I have been teaching poetry writing to the little kids | |
| in some broken ghetto school in Brooklyn | |
| 4 pm or so, hungry, just home | |
| I have a date with the curly haired psychologist | |
| who I had seen for years in halls of the New School | |
| (somewhere, somewhere… still photos of our nakedness) | |
| I’m exhausted and turn the TV on | 14 |
| and there are two people who look like anyone | 15 |
| except it is Lizabeth Scott and Humphrey Bogart | 16 |
| entwined on a nightclub floor | 17 |
| and he is home from the war, decorated, but AWOL | 18 |
| and she is no good as we all know | 19 |
| but with the face of a blonde angel | 20 |
| He tells her that her husband is dead, to test her: | 21 |
| Her whole body had gone soft | 22 |
| when I slugged her with it | 23 |
| (the great, the endless voice over of our lives) | 24 |
| And the worst day which I do not remember | 25 |
| six months old according to my father | 26 |
| abandoned by Mother in the street in my stroller | 27 |
| that day which set the tone of the days | 28 |
| from one day to the next day unto this day forever | 29 |
| And the days from the ocean of days | 30 |
| that I do not think of that I did not think on | 31+ |
| when it seemed that the days were endless | |
| And of course the last day which I shall not remember |
Francis Levy is the author of The Kafka Studies Department, a collection of stories with illustrations by Hallie Cohen. He is also the author of the novels Erotomania: A Romance, Seven Days in Rio andTombstone: Not a Western.