by Jim Harrison
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for Linda (again)
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Water
Cabbage
Mom and Dad
Night Dharma
Modern Times
Adding It Up
Young Love
The Movie
Livingston Suite
Hill
Buried Time
Angry Women
Before the Trip
Paris Television
Opal
The Man Who Looked for Sunlight
Alcohol
En Veracruz en 1941
In Veracruz in 1941
Dream Love
Flower, 2001
Patagonia Poem
Reading Calasso
The Bear
Bars
Diabetes
Searchers
Mother Night
The Creek
Birds Again
Becoming
Portal, Arizona
Easter Morning
Corrido Sonorense
Sonoran Corrida
Older Love
Los viejos tiempos
The Old Days
Two Girls
The Little Appearances of God
Waves
Time
An Old Man
To a Meadowlark
November
Cold Poem
Invasive
On the Way to the Doctor’s
Español
Spanish
Pico
The Short Course
Science
The Fish in My Life
A Letter to Ted & Dan
Effluvia
Joseph’s Poem
Unbuilding
Suzanne Wilson
Current Events
Poem of War (i)
Poem of War (ii)
Rachel’s Bulldozer
After the War
Brothers and Sisters
Fence Line Tree
Saving Daylight
Incomprehension
Memorial Day
Letter Poem to Sam Hamill and Dan Gerber
Hakuin and Welch
L’envoi
Marching
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright, Credits, and Feedback Link
Donor page
Water
Before I was born I was water.
I thought of this sitting on a blue
chair surrounded by pink, red, white
hollyhocks in the yard in front
of my green studio. There are conclusions
to be drawn but I can’t do it anymore.
Born man, child man, singing man,
dancing man, loving man, old man,
dying man. This is a round river
and we are her fish who become water.
Cabbage
If only I had the genius of a cabbage
or even an onion to grow myself
in their laminae from the holy core
that bespeaks the final shape. Nothing
is outside of us in this overinterpreted world.
Bruises are the mouths of our perceptions.
The gods who have died are able to come
to life again. It’s their secret that they wish
to share if anyone knows that they exist.
Belief is a mood that weighs nothing on anyone’s
scale but nevertheless exists. The moose
down the road wears the black cloak of a god
and the dead bird lifts from a bed of moss
in a shape totally unknown to us.
It’s after midnight in Montana.
I test the thickness of the universe, its resilience
to carry us further than any of us wish to go.
We shed our shapes slowly like moving water,
which ends up as it will so utterly far from home.
Mom and Dad
Gentle readers, feel your naked belly button where
you were tied to your mother. Kneel and thank
her for your jubilant but woebegone life. Don’t
for a moment think of the mood of your parents
when you were conceived which so vitally affects
your destiny. You have no control over that and
it’s unprofitable to wonder if they were pissed
off or drunk, bored, watching television news,
listening to country music, or hopefully out in
the orchard grass feeling the crunch of wind-
fall apples under their frantic bodies.
Night Dharma
How restlessly the Buddha sleeps
between my ears, dreaming his dreams
of emptiness, writing his verbless poems.
(I almost rejected “green tree
white goat red sun blue sea.”)
Verbs are time’s illusion, he says.
In the stillness that surrounds us
we think we have to probe our wounds,
but with what? Mind caresses mind
not by saying no or yes but neither.
Turn your watch back to your birth
for a moment, then way ahead beyond
any expectation. There never was a coffin
worth a dime. These words emerge
from the skin as the sweat of gods
who drink only from the Great Mother’s breasts.
Buddha sleeps on, disturbed when I disturb
him from his liquid dreams of blood and bone.
Without comment he sees the raven carrying
off the infant snake, the lovers’ foggy
gasps, the lion’s tongue that skins us.
One day we dozed against a white pine stump
in a world of dogwood and sugar plum blossoms.
An eye for an eye, he said, trading
a left for my right, the air green tea
in the sky’s blue cup.
Modern Times
I
Each man should own three
belts just as he once had three
legs the better to turn corners.
Women had three arms
the better to hold things.
Now without these extra limbs
men and women can’t remember
the life they don’t know they’ve forgotten
packed away with dried plum buds
and evening primroses. They’ve traded
their limbs for clocks and ideas,
their hearts packed in salt. They thought
it was noon but
it’s nearly midnight.
II
Every poem is the poem
before the last. We know this absurd
feeling of wishing to live on the lip
of a future that can’t quite
manage to happen, the ache
of the girl who decided not to exist
before she was born, the quizzical
trashcan behind the abortion clinic,
the unacknowledged caskets that always
arrive on night flights. We assumed
God loved most the piety of beggars,
that we should properly cower before
our elected murderers, that we could
sit tight behind our locked doors
and try to pretend we were rich
and happy children until time wore out.
III
We worked for food and shelter
and then bought the arts and better cars,
bigger houses, smarter children
who couldn’t really learn to read and write.
It was too hard. The arts escaped
to a different heaven to get rid of us.
We misunderstood food and shelter,
flies crawling on a window,
fluttering up and down,
seeing the outside beyond reach
because of the invention of glass
that couldn’t be undone. We lived
within the outside for two million years
and now it’s mostly photos.
We chose wallpaper and paint over leaves
and rivers. In our dream of safety
we decided not to know the world.
IV
The question is, does the dog
remember her childhood?
If so, our universe changes,
tilts a bit. We do not willingly
offer much to the creature world,
a little food to amuse our loneliness.
We made funeral pyres of the houses
of bears and birds because they neglected
to console our paths to fortune.
They commit love with an intensity
unknown to us and without advice.
They read the world rather than books
and don’t bother with names to identify
themselves. To them we’re a Chinese film
without subtitles. Meanwhile my dog
dreams back to her seven-week childhood
in Wisconsin, over so soon before she took
a flight west to Montana, emerging
from a crate with a quizzical smile.
V
Do more people die asleep or awake?
We can easily avoid both conditions
but I’m not telling you how.
Why interrupt the ancient flow?
There’s nothing more solid in life
than the will toward greed and self-destruction
but also beauty, who doesn’t mind
sitting on her own tired knees.
How can I find my mother and father,
a sister and a brother if they’re dead?
I’ve had to learn other languages
to make contact, the creature world
and flora, the mute landscape
offering a quiet music without verbs
and nouns. This is the language
of the departed ones. Those who have become
birds seem happy to be no longer us.
Salvation isn’t coming. It’s always been here.
VI
I’ve been on a full-time moon
watch this winter for reasons
I can’t determine. Maybe I’m helping out?
My government is so loathsome I’ve turned
to other, much more important things.
The beetle takes a half hour on a leisurely
stroll across the patio, heading
northwest as if it truly mattered.
I think of Wallace Stevens in his office
doing insurance work as if it truly mattered.
He stays late on a spring afternoon
watching swallows swoop for insects
that haven’t yet hatched in Hartford,
an old poet greedy for the life
he was never remotely to have;
a white marriage, love as a cold
cinderblock never to arise from the rubble,
his life a long slow Dresden
burning its own jealous ashes.
VII
I can freely tie myself up without rope.
This talent is in the realm of antimagic
and many people have it. On a dawn
walk despite the creek, birds and forest
I have to get through the used part,
the murky fluid of rehearsals
and resentments, but then they drain away
and I’m finally where I already am,
smack-dab in the middle of each step,
the air you can taste, the evening
primrose that startled by my visit
doesn’t turn away. When I read
the ancient manuscripts of earth
many of the lines are missing
that I’m expected to complete.
I’m the earth, too, sharing this song
of blood and bone with the whale,
monkey and house cat. At eye level
with toad our eyes share the passage
of this ghost ship we boarded at birth.
VIII
There are a lot of muted grays in life,
dull bronzes, mornings the color
of a lead sinker that will never help
you catch a fish, and then a trace
of sun allows you to see down into the water
where three minnows pass diagonally above
a sunken log, two tadpoles, the pebble-
circular swirl of a spawning bed, a glutinous
clot of frog eggs, and farther out
a turtle peering above a lily pad’s edge.
Salvation from mood can be slow
in coming. Two song sparrows pick
this moment to fight over a lady,
a private woodland Iraq shrieking
“She’s mine,” as she pretends to be otherwise
occupied. The sky doesn’t study
our immobility. When the mood has fled
I listen to the air, and a cloud is only
a cloud again though I’d like to see a dragon
emerging upward to the water’s surface,
a gesture to lift us above our human weight.
IX
I salute the tiny insect crawling
back and forth across my journal,
perhaps eating the infinitesimal particles
of dried sweat from the effort to make music
and reason out of the ocean of life
most often opaque as dirty cream.
I tell this insect how unlucky for him.
He should be outside eating the tender cores
of spring flowers or alighting on a bird’s
back the better to fly away on another’s wings.
Our lives are novels we don’t want to read
and we so gracelessly translate their world
for our own purposes. We live morosely
in this graveyard long before we’re buried.
Still we love our green and blue world
and leap out of our lives from sea to shining
sea. We know that our despised world
is our Great Mother’s breast warm to our desert lips.
X
What I’m doing is what I’m already
doing. The mind can’t accept the ordinary.
The pope fed through his nose would prefer
pasta marinara as he grabs at heaven
as a gentle old monkey might at a vine
while hanging from a tree because of the waiting
jaguar far below. Finding myself where I already
>
am is a daily chore. Chaos herself is fragile.
A step takes seconds. Clocks leak our invisible
blood in invisible increments. I’d rather say,
“sun is up, high brutal noon, sun is down,
night comes,” in rhythm with the bird’s superior
clock. I can no longer reshape the unbearable
world and have given up to count birds.
Up the mountain in a mesquite thicket
two pale-blue female lazuli buntings yield
to the tally clicker in my vest pocket,
their souls intact, ignoring my glorious smile.
I’ve abandoned the culture’s ghost not my life,
Jim on the south slope at dawn counting birds.
Adding It Up
I forgot long division but does one
go into sixty-six more than sixty-six times?
There’s the mother, two daughters, eight dogs,
I can’t name all the cats and horses, a farm
for thirty-five years, then Montana, a cabin,
a border casita, two grandsons, two sons-in-law,
and graced by the sun and the moon, red wine
and garlic, lakes and rivers, the millions of trees.
I can’t help but count out of habit, the secret
door underneath the vast stump where I founded
the usual Cro-Magnon religion, a door
enveloped by immense roots through which one day
I watched the passing legs of sandhill cranes,
napping where countless bears have napped,
an aperture above where the sky and the gods
may enter, yet I’m without the courage to watch
the full moon through this space. I can’t figure
out a life. We’re groundlings who wish to fly.
I live strongly in the memories of my dead dogs.
It’s just a feeling that memories float around
waiting to be caught. I miss the cat that perched
on my head during zazen. Since my brother died
I’ve claimed the privilege of speaking to local rocks,
trees, birds, the creek. Last night a broad moonbeam