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Saving Daylight

Page 8

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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