by Jim Harrison
The Leader is confident that Jesus and the Apostles
are his invisible SWAT team. His God
is a chatterbox full of martial instructions.
I worry about the soul life of these thousand
tiny bugs that die on the midnight coffee
table. Here today, gone tomorrow, but then
in cosmic time we live a single second.
Once a year all world leaders should be put
in an Olympic swimming pool full of rotten
human blood to let them dog-paddle in their creation.
The lifeguard is a blind child playing a video war game.
Men look at women’s tits and flip out.
This is the mystery of life, but then they have a line
of coke, some meth, a few beers, and beat up or rape
or shoot someone. They make movies about this.
We must adore our fatal savagery. The child
thrown naked into the snowbank for peeing the bed
then kills the neighbor’s cat, etc., etc. The midget
dreamt he grew two feet. Between the Virgin
and the garrison the flower becomes a knife.
My, how our government strains us
through its filthy sheets. We’re drawn
from birth through the sucking vortex
of greed. It all looked good on paper.
To change Rhys, God is a doormat in a world
full of hobnailed boots. Proud of his feet
the Leader is common change. He’s everywhere.
I’ve been looking closely at my smaller
mythologies the better to love them, those colorful
fibs and false conclusions, the mire
of private galaxies that kept
ancient man on earth and me alive.
Brothers and Sisters
I’m trying to open a window in this very old house of indeterminate age buried toward the back of a large ranch here in the Southwest, abandoned for so long that there’s no road leading into it but a slight indentation in the pastureland, last lived in by the owner’s great-uncle who moved to New York City to listen to music, or so he said, but his grandnephew said that the man was “light in his loafers,” which was hard to be back in New Mexico in those days. In the pantry under a stained vinegar cruet is a sepia photo of him and his sister in their early teens on the front porch of the house, dressed unconvincingly as vaqueros, as handsome as young people get. The photo is dated 1927 and lights up the pantry. I find out that the girl died in childbirth in the middle thirties in Pasadena, the boy committed suicide in Havana in 1952, both dying in the hands of love. Out in the yard I shine my flashlight down a hole under a massive juniper stump. A rattlesnake forms itself into anxious coils surrounding its pretty babies stunned by the light.
Fence Line Tree
There’s a single tree at the fence line
here in Montana, a little like a tree
in the Sandhills of Nebraska, which may be miles
away. When I cross the unfertile pasture strewn
with rocks and the holes of gophers, badgers, coyotes,
and the rattlesnake den (a thousand killed
in a decade because they don’t mix well with dogs
and children) in an hour’s walking and reach
the tree, I find it oppressive. Likely it’s
as old as I am, withstanding its isolation,
all gnarled and twisted from its battle
with weather. I sit against it until we merge,
and when I return home in the cold, windy
twilight I feel I’ve been gone for years.
Saving Daylight
I finally got back the hour
stolen from me last spring.
What did they do with it
but put it in some nasty cold storage?
Up north a farm neighbor wouldn’t change
his clocks, saying, “I’m sticking with God’s time.”
All of these people of late seem to know
God rather personally. God even tells
girls to limit themselves to heavy petting
and avoid the act they call “full penetration.”
I don’t seem to receive these instructions
that tell me to go to war, and not to look
at a married woman’s butt when she leans
over to fetch a package from her car’s
backseat. I’m enrolled in a school without
visible teachers, the divine mumbling
just out of earshot, the whispering from the four-million-
mile-an-hour winds on the sun. The dead rabbit
in the road spoke to me yesterday, also the owl’s wing
in the garage likely torn off by a goshawk.
In this bin of ice you must carefully
try to pick the right cube.
Incomprehension
We have running water in our
home though none of us know
why dogs exist.
Nevertheless, we love both water
and dogs and believe God might
fix our lives with his golden wrench.
This is the day the moon is closest
to us, the new moon slender
as a gray hair I pulled from my head.
The man said that there is no actual
life, only what we remember. In the
tropics the lizard is the God of the rock
he lives upon and under.
We didn’t know the pages were
stuck together and we’d never
understand anything.
The church says God is a spy
who keeps track of how we misuse
our genitals. He always yawns
at the beginning of work.
I can only offer you the ten numbers
I wrote down when I read the
thermometer today, this incredible
machine I worship but don’t understand.
I was the only one to see the boat sunken
on land. There were no survivors except
the few human rats that leapt like
flying squirrels.
The Queen of Earth is thought to be
up for grabs. She makes us shiver
in fear to keep us warm.
Memorial Day
Things I didn’t know about until today:
Clip your toenails when wet and they won’t crack.
The white in birdfeathers comes from the moon,
the yellow from the sun,
the black from night herself.
And that at three PM today
when we have our full minute of silence
for our millions of war dead,
their ghosts beyond the invisible carapace
above the green and blue turning earth
(from which birds get other colors),
the ghosts will vomit up the remnants
of their bone dust on hearing the strident
martial music rising up to them,
the hard-peckered music of the living,
the music of the machineries of war
in the wallets of the rich. And the ghosts ask us
to send up the music of earth:
three tree frogs, two loons, splash of fish
jumping, the wind’s verbless carols.
Letter Poem to Sam Hamill and Dan Gerber
I’ve been translating the language with which creatures
address God, including the nonharmonic bleats
of dying sheep, the burpish fish, the tenor groan
of the toad in the snake’s mouth, the croak
of the seagull flopping on the yellow line,
misnamed mockingbird and catbird singing hundreds
of borrowed songs, coyotes’ joyous yipe when they
bring down a fawn that honks like a bicycle
horn for his helpless mother. The ladybug on the table
was finally still. I strained my ear clo
se to her
during the final moments but only heard Mozart
from the other room. She was beyond reach.
One night under a big moon I heard the massive-
lunged scream of a horse pounding in the pasture
across the creek, then his breathing above the creek
gurgle. This language is closer to what we spoke
in Africa seventy thousand years ago before
we started writing things down and now we can’t
seem to stop. I can’t imagine how we thought that
we’re better than any other creatures except that
we wrote ourselves into it. Someone looked down
from Babel’s tower and got the wrong idea, ignoring
the birds above him. I learned all this one day
listening to a raven funeral in a fir tree behind
my cabin, and learned it again listening to a wolf
howling from the river delta nearby. It’s an old
secret past anyone’s caring, or so it seems.
Yrs,
Jim Harrison
June 20, 2001
Hakuin and Welch
Driving with implacable Hakuin, the cruelest
teacher who ever lived, across the reaches
of Snoqualmie Pass, snow and ice after moving
upward through dense rain. The sky cleared
for a moment and did I see ornate space vehicles
against the mountain wall? I’m frankly scared
but Hakuin steadies me, not Mom who said
shame on you, or Dad so long dead his spirit
only returns to me when I’m fishing. At Jim Welch’s
memorial in Seattle I could again see all human
beings and creatures flowering and dying in the void,
which is all that we are given along with the suffering
so ignored by angels. In Butte I picked up a bum
on crutches, a leg jellied in Vietnam, who took seven
prescriptions drawn from his pocket with a bottle
of pop. “Time isn’t on our side,” he said with the air
of a comic. I either drove through the mountains
or the mountains moved past me, the valley
rivers often flowing the wrong way. This is God’s
nude world. Home, I watched the unclothed moon
rise while holding our new unruly pup
who speaks the language of Hakuin.
Protect your family. You don’t know much.
Don’t offer yourself up to this world.
A sense of destiny is a terrible thing.
L’envoi
All of my life I’ve held myself
at an undisclosed location.
Sometimes I have a roof over my head
but no floor, and sometimes a floor but no roof.
This is the song of a man who wrote songs
without music, dog songs, river songs,
bear songs, bird songs though they didn’t
need my help, and many people songs.
The just-waking universe returned the favor
with spherical carols as if creation
hadn’t stopped a minute, which it hadn’t,
as if our songs helped it become itself.
We gave no voice to the bear but watched
our minds allow the bear to become a bear.
At a brief still point on the whirling earth
we saw both the stars and the ground we walked
upon, struggling to recognize each other at noon,
talked ourselves deaf and blind on the sharp
edge of disappearing for reasons we never
figured out. I was conceived near a dance hall
on a bend of a river, now sixty-seven years
downstream I’m singing a water song
not struggling against the ungentle current.
Marching
At dawn I heard among birdcalls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother’s amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, crisscrossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.
About the Author
Jim Harrison is a poet and novelist dividing his year between Montana and the Mexican border.
Acknowledgments
I must give thanks to William Barillas and María Ghiggia, who translated the four poems into Spanish.
Poems from Saving Daylight appeared in the following publications:
American Life in Poetry: “Marching”
American Poetry Review: “Modern Times,” “Dream Love,”
“Becoming,” “Hakuin and Welch”
Border Beat: “In Veracruz in 1941”
Brick: “Alcohol,” “Time,” “Letter Poem to Sam Hamill and Dan Gerber”
Copper Canyon Press broadsides: “Night Dharma,” “Older Love”
Dunes Review: “A Letter to Ted & Dan”
Exquisite Corpse: “Young Love,” “After the War”
Five Points: “Reading Calasso,” “The Bear,” “To a Meadowlark,” “November,” “Joseph’s Poem”
Good Poems for Hard Times, Garrison Keillor, ed. (New York: Viking): “Easter Morning”
Men’s Journal: “Bars”
The Midwest Quarterly: “An Old Man,” “Brothers and Sisters”
New Letters: “Cabbage,” “Angry Women,” “Alcohol,” “Two Girls,” “On the Way to the Doctor’s,” “L’envoi”
New York Times Book Review: “The Old Days”
Open City: “Adding It Up,” “Easter Morning,” “Saving Daylight”
Poets Against the War: “Poem of War (I)” and “Poem of War (II)” appeared as a single poem, “Poem of War”
Pressed Wafer Broadsides for John Wieners: “Portal, Arizona”
TriQuarterly: “Effluvia,” “Memorial Day”
The Writer’s Almanac: “Older Love,” “Easter Morning”
“Livingston Suite” first appeared as a letterpress chapbook from Limberlost Press
Copyright 2007 by Jim Harrison
All rights reserved
Copper Canyon Press gratefully acknowledges and thanks Russell Chatham for the use of his lithograph, Moonrise Over the Roaring Fork River, 22” × 26”, 2004, and photographer Alec Soth for the use of his portrait of Jim Harrison, taken in Livingston, Montana, 2004.
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