by Jim Harrison
I’ve asked the French government,
Richelieu in fact, for the use of a one-room
cabin in the Dordogne where I can recreate
the local origin of man in this birthplace
of the Occident, riding the spear
of the Occident into the future, the iron horse
that makes us glue the life of mankind
together with blood.
In France I went to a place
of grandeur though it was only
a thicket as large as the average hotel room.
I learned that we’ll float into eternity
like the dehydrated maggots I saw
in Mexico around the body of a desert tortoise
missing an interior that had fled
seven days before. How grand.
For after death I’ve been given
the false biblical promise of smoking privileges
and the possession of hundreds of small
photos of all the dogs and women I’ve known.
The beasts (the plane and I) land on earth.
Time for a hot dog and a small pizza.
I glance at the mellifluous rubbing
of a melancholy woman’s buttocks.
I tell her to celebrate her tears.
Effluvia
Tonight the newish moon is orange
from the smoke of a forest fire, a wedge of fresh orange.
The mystery of ink pumped up from three
thousand feet in northern Michigan from the bed
of a Pleistocene sea. A meteor hit
a massive group of giant squid, some say
millions, from whose ink I write this poem.
A bold girl I once knew made love
on lysergic acid to a dolphin and a chimp,
though not the same day. She said the chimp
was too hairy, too fast, and improbably insensitive.
An artist friend made me a cocktail shaker
from a rubbery translucent material and in the pinkish
form of a human stomach. Shake it and the vodka
drops like rain into a sea of happiness.
I am a relic in a reliquary.
All of these damp skulls of ghosts,
many of them feathered, telling
me that the past isn’t very past.
On an airliner going to both dream coasts
I’m a Romantic Poet so alone and lonely.
Lucky for me there are pilots up front.
We must give our fantasy women homely names
to keep our feet barely on the ground of this dismembered
earth: Wilma, Edna, Ethel, Blanche, Frida.
Otherwise we’ll fly away on the backs
of their somnambulistic lust, fleas in their plumage.
The birds above the river yesterday: Swainson’s
hawk, prairie and peregrine falcons, bald and golden
eagles, osprey, wild geese, fifty-two sandhill cranes.
Their soaring bodies nearly lifting us from the river.
Joseph’s Poem
It’s the date that gets me
down. It keeps changing.
Others have noticed this.
Not long ago up at Hard Luck Ranch,
Diana, the cow dog, was young.
Now her face looks like my own.
Surprise, she doesn’t say, with each
halting step, the world is going away.
How could I have thought otherwise,
these dogging steps pit-patting
to and fro, though when the soul
rises to the moment, moment by moment
it is otherwise. Dog’s foot is holy
and the geezer, childish again,
is deep up a canyon with his dog
close to the edge of the world,
the heart beating a thousand times
a minute, probably more,
as if it were an interior propeller
to whir us upward, but it’s not.
Once I held the heart of a bear
that was about my size. Stewed it back
at the cabin and thought that the sky
opened up and changed her colors,
smelled the fumes of a falling contrail,
sensed the world behind my back
and beneath my feet, ravens above,
each tree its individual odor,
the night no longer night,
the burst of water around my body,
the world unfolding in glory with each step.
Unbuilding
It’s harder
to dismantle your life
than build it.
One Sunday morning at Hard Luck Ranch
the roadrunner flits around the backyard
like an American poet,
ignored by nine cow dogs lying in patches
of sun, also by three ravens,
and finally by seven Gambel’s quail
who do not know that they’re delicious roasted
when they come to the bowl of water.
It is always possible to see the traceries of birds,
but on the scrambled porn channel the woman’s
mouth that prays is used otherwise and the ground
delivers up insects I’ve never noticed before.
I found myself in the slightest prayer
for Diana who I fear will die like her
namesake did far across the ocean blue.
She’s fourteen with cancer of the mouth
and throat though around Christmastime
I found her making love with her son Ace.
When they finished I gave her extra biscuits
for being so human, for staying as young
as her mind and body called out for her to be.
No rain now for one hundred twenty-three days
so I read Su Tung-p’o where it’s always raining,
Rain drenches down as from a tilted basin,
and recall I owe forty thousand on my credit cards.
Carried along by red wine and birds, dogs,
the roadrunner’s charm, I take apart my life
stone by mortared stone while I’m still strong
enough to do so, or think that I am,
wishing that I could smile like a lazy
dog curled in the dust on Sunday morning,
far from the shroud I sewed for my life.
Suzanne Wilson
Is it better to rake all the leaves
in one’s life into a pile
or leave them scattered? That’s a good question
as questions go, but then they’re easier to burn
in one place. The years take their toll,
our lives, to be exact. We burn without fire
and without effort so slowly the wick of this lamp
seems endless. And then the fire is out,
a hallowed time. And those who took the light
with them pull us slowly toward their breasts.
Current Events
I’m a brownish American who wonders
if civilization can be glued together with blood.
The written word is no longer understood.
We’ve had dogs longer than governments.
Millions of us must travel to Washington
and not talk but bark like dogs.
We must practice our barking and in unison
raise a mighty bark. The sun turns amber
and they’re opening the well-oiled gates of hell.
Poem of War (I)
The old rancher of seventy-nine years
said while branding and nutting young bulls
with the rank odor of burned hairs and flesh
in the air, the oil-slippery red nuts
plopping into a galvanized bucket,
“This smells just like Guadalcanal.”
Poem of War (II)
The theocratic cowboy forgetting Vietnam rides
into town on a red horse. He’
s praying to himself
not God. War prayers. The red horse
he rides is the horse of blasphemy. Jesus
leads a flower-laden donkey across the Red Sea
in the other direction, his nose full of the stink
of corpses. Buddha and Muhammad offer
cool water from a palm’s shade while young
men die in the rockets’ red glare.
And in the old men’s dreams
René Char asked, “Who stands on the gangplank
directing operations, the captain or the rats?”
Whitman said, “So many young throats
choked on their own blood.” God says nothing.
Rachel’s Bulldozer
The man sitting on the cold stone hearth
of the fireplace
considers tomorrow, the virulent
skirmishes with reality
he takes part in, always surprised,
in order to earn a living.
On most days it’s this villain
reality making the heart ache,
creeping under the long shirtsleeves
to suffocate the armpits,
each day’s terror pouring vinegar
into the heart valve.
Today it’s Rachel Corrie making me
ashamed to be human,
beating her girlish fists against
the oncoming bulldozer blade.
Strangled mute before the television screen
we do not deserve to witness this courage.
After the War
God wears orange and black
on Halloween. The bumblebee hummingbird
in Cuba weighs less than a penny.
I was joined by the head to this world.
No surgery was possible.
We keep doing things together.
There’s almost never a stoplight
where rivers cross each other.
Congress is as fake as television sex.
The parts are off a few inches and don’t actually
meet. It’s in bad taste to send the heads
of children to Washington.
Just today I noticed that all truly valuable
knowledge is lost between generations. Of course
life is upsetting. What else could be upsetting?
From not very far in space I see the tiny pink
splotches of literature here and there upon
the earth about the size of dog pounds.
Reporters mostly reported themselves.
This was a new touch. They received
producer credits and director’s perks.
Tonight I smell a different kind
of darkness. The burning celluloid of news.
The Virgin strolls through Washington, D.C.,
with an ice pick shoved in her ear.
Who is taking this time machine
from the present into the present?
One of the oldest stories: dead dicks playing
with death toys. Plato said war is always greed.
Red blood turns brown in the heat. It’s only
the liquid shit of slaves.
Un mundo raro. The angel is decidedly female.
She weighs her weight in flowers.
She has no talent for our discourse,
which she said was a septic tank burble.
Of the 90 billion galaxies a few are bad
apples, especially a fusion of male stars
not unlike galactic gay sex. Washington
is concerned, and the pope is stressed.
All over America people appear to be drinking
small bottles of water. Fill them with French
red wine and shoot out the streetlights.
As a long-lived interior astronaut
it was mostly just space. The void
was my home in which I invented
the undescribed earth.
This is Rome. There are no Christians
so we throw Muslims to the lions of war.
We have the world in the dentist’s chair.
I pray daily for seven mortally ill women,
not to say that life is a mortal illness.
It’s always been a matter of timing.
Lives are as hard to track as flying birds.
To understand the news is to drag a dead dog
behind you with a paper leash.
Once you loved the dog.
Try to remember all of the birds
you’ve heard but didn’t see.
This is called grace.
I was living far too high in my mind
and started fishing like the autistic child
they found the next morning still fishing.
The war became X-rated. No American bodies.
During these times many of us
would have been far happier as fish, making
occasional little jumps up above the water’s
surface for a view of the new century.
It seems that everything is a matter
of time, from cooking to dropping dead.
Just moments earlier the dead soldier
drank warm orange juice, scratched his ass
and thought about the Chicago Cubs.
Mrs. America is smothering the world
in her new pair of enormous fake tits.
She’s the purgatorial mother
who can’t stop eating children.
Rose was struck twice by a rattler
in the yard, a fang broken off in her eyeball.
Now old dog and old master each
have an eye full of bloody milk.
The end of the war was announced
by the Leader in a uniform from the deck
of an aircraft carrier, one of those deluxe
cruise ships that never actually touches
the lands they visit.
A girl of a different color kissed me once.
I think it was in Brazil. Celestial buttocks.
Honeysuckle dawn. Imanja rose from the sea,
her head buried in a red sun.
Hot August night, a forty-day heat wave.
Thousands of the tiniest bugs possible
are dying in this old ranch house. Like humans
they are easily attracted to the wrong light.
Tonight the moon is an orange ceiling globe
from a forest fire across the river. In the dark
animals run, stumble, run, stumble.
I stopped three feet from the top
of Everest. Fuck it, I’m not going
a single inch farther.
We need a poetry of fishscales, coxcombs,
soot, dried moss, the heated aortas of whales,
to respond to the vulpine sniggers of the gods.
Throughout history soldiers want to go to war
and when they get there straightaway wish
to go home.
Change the lens on this vast picture show.
See the mosquito’s slender beak penetrate
the baby’s ass. A touch of evil.
I read the unshakable dreams of the hundred-
year-old lesbian, life shorn of the perfection
of the pork chop. Everyone lacks inevitability.
Michael and Joseph never truly returned
home because they weren’t the same people
they were when they left home.
My dog Rose can’t stop chasing curlews
who lead her a mile this way and that.
I have to catch her before she dies of exhaustion.
This is a metaphor of nothing but itself.
The motives were somewhat imaginary but people
died in earnest. Some were
shoveled up like flattened roadkill.
During World War II my brother John
and I would holler “bombs over Tokyo”
when we pooped. A different kind of war.
She kicked her red sandal at the sun
<
br /> but it landed in a parking-lot mud puddle.
“We’re de-haired chimps,” she said
finishing her pistachio ice-cream cone.
Osama won really big I heard on a game
show. We changed our institutions,
the surge toward a fascist Disneyland.
I wish I had danced more, said the old man
drawing nearer his death bedstead in a foot
of grass in the back forty. Where’s my teddy bear?
Of late, on television we are threatened
by crocodiles, snakes and bears
in full frontal nudity. Politicians are clothed.
My childhood Jesus has become an oil guy
but then he’s from the area. Seek and ye shall
find an oil well. The daughter of murder is murder.
Nothing can be understood clearly. A second into
death we’ll ask, “What’s happening?” Viola said
that there’s an invisible world out there and we’re
living within it. Rose dreams of ghost snakes.
Of late, politicians remind me of teen prostitutes
the way they sell their asses cheap, the swagger
and confusion, the girlish resolutions. They can’t go
home because everyone there is embarrassed.
I nearly collapsed yesterday but couldn’t find
an appropriate place. Our pieces are anchored
a thousand miles deep in molten rock. A spider-
web draws us an equal distance toward the heavens.