by Jim Harrison
for flies, audible heat from the field where steers fed.
I’m going to Stonehenge to recant, or from the manure pile
behind this shed I’m going to admit to a cow that I’ve lied.
He writes with a putty knife and goo, at night the North Star
hangs on the mountain peak like a Christmas ornament.
On the table the frozen rattlesnake thaws, the perfect club!
The perfect crime! Soon now to be skinned for my hatband.
VII
Says he, “Ah Edward I too have a dark past of manual labor.”
But now Trivium Charontis seem to want me for Mars.
If her thighs weigh 21 pounds apiece what do her lips weigh?
Do that trick where you touch your toes. Do that right now.
The bold U.S.A. cowpoke in Bozeman, Montana, hates hippies,
cuts off their hair, makes $200 a month, room and board.
We want the sow bear that killed Clark’s sheep to go away.
She has two cubs but must die for her terrible appetite.
Girl-of-my-dreams if you’ll be mine I’ll give up poetry
and be your index finger, lapdog, donkey, obvious unicorn.
VIII
The color of a poppy and bruised, the subalpine green that
ascends the mountainside from where the eagle looked at sheep.
Her sappy brain fleers, is part of the satin shirt (Western) she
wears, chartreuse with red scarf. Poeet he says with two ees!
The bull we frighten by waving our hats bellows, his pecker
lengthens touching the grass, he wheels, foam from the mouth.
How do we shoot those things that don’t even know they’re animals
grazing and stalking in the high meadow: puma elk grizzly deer.
When he pulled the trigger the deer bucked like a horse, spine
broken, grew pink in circles, became a lover kissing him goodnight.
IX
He said the grizzly sat eating the sheep and when the bullet
struck tore the sheep in two, fell over backward dead.
With her mouth warm or cold she remains a welcome mat, a hole
shot through it many years ago in Ohio. Hump. Hemp treaded.
Is there an acre left to be allotted to each man & beast so
they might regard each other on hands and knees behind fences?
The sun straight above was white and aluminum and the trout
on the river bottom watched his feet slip clumsily on the rocks.
I want an obscene epitaph, one that will disgust the Memorial
Day crowds so that they’ll indignantly topple my gravestone.
X
Praise me at Durkheim Fair where I’ve never been, hurling
grenade wursts at those who killed my uncle back in 1944.
Nothing is forgiven. The hurt child is thirty-one years old
and the girl in the pale blue dress walks out with another.
Where love lies. In the crawl space under the back porch
thinking of the aunt seen shedding her black bathing suit.
That girl was rended by the rapist. I’ll send her a healing
sonnet in heaven. Forgive us. Forgive us. Forgive us.
The moon I saw through her legs beneath the cherry tree had
no footprints on it and a thigh easily blocked out its light.
Lauren Hutton has replaced Norma Jean, Ava Gardner, Lee Remick
and Vanessa Redgrave in my Calvinist fantasies. Don’t go away.
XI
The brain opens the hand which touches that spot, clinically
soft, a member raises from his chair and insists upon his rights.
In some eye bank a cornea is frozen in liquid nitrogen. One day
my love I’ll see your body from the left side of my face.
Half the team, a Belgian mare, was huge though weak. She died
convulsively from the 80-volt prod, still harnessed to her mate.
Alvin C. shot the last wolf in the Judith Basin after a four-year
hunt, raising a new breed of hounds to help. Dressed out 90 lbs.
When it rains I want to go north into the taiga, and before I
freeze in arid cold watch the reindeer watch the northern lights.
XII
Says Borges in Ficciones, “I’m in hell. I’m dead,” and the dark
is glandular and swells about my feet concealing the ground.
Let us love the sun, little children but it is around too
much to notice and has no visible phases to care about.
Two pounds of steak eaten in deference to a tequila hangover.
His sign is that of a pig, a thousand-pound Hampshire boar.
Some would say her face looked homely with that thing sticking
out of it as if to feed her. Not I, said Wynken, not I.
The child is fully clothed but sits in the puddle madly
slapping the warm water on which the sun ripples and churns.
XIII
The night is thin and watery; fish in the air
and moonglint off her necklace of human teeth.
Bring O bring back my Bonnie and I’ll return yours
with interest and exhaustion. I’m stuck between those legs.
Dangers of drugs: out in the swamp’s middle he’s stoned
and a bear hound mammothly threatens. Dazed with fright.
Marcia I won’t go to Paris – too free with your body –
it’s mine it’s mine it’s mine not just everyone’s.
Now in this natal month Christ must be in some distant
nebula. O come down right now and be with us.
In the hole he fell in, a well pit, yellow jackets stung
him to death. Within minutes death can come by bees.
XIV
That heartless finch, botulinal. An official wheeze passes through
the screen door into the night, the vision of her finally dead.
I’ve decided here in Chico, Montana, that Nixon isn’t president
and that that nasty item, Agnew, is retired to a hamster farm.
And that those mountains hold no people but geologists
spying on each other, and beasts spying on the geologists.
Mule deer die from curiosity – what can that thing be
wandering around with a stick, forgotten from last year?
Some tourists confuse me for an actual cowboy, ecstasy in
deceit, no longer a poet but a bona fide paper buckaroo.
I offer a twenty-one-gun salute to the caress as the blackflies buzz
around me and the rotting elk hides. The true source of the stink.
XV
Why did this sheep die? The legs are thin, stomach hugely
bloated. The girl cries and kicks her legs on the sofa.
The new marvels of language don’t come up from the depths
but from the transparent layer, the soiled skin of things.
In London for puissant literary reasons he sits with the other
lost ones at a Soho striptease show. An endless oyster bar.
We’ll need miracles of art and reason to raise these years
which are tombstones carved out of soap by the world’s senators.
We’ll have to move out at dawn and the dew is only a military
metaphor for the generally felt hidden-behind-bushes sorrow.
XVI
It is an hour before dawn and even prophets sleep
on their beds of gravel. Dreams of fish & hemlines.
The scissors moves across the paper and through
the beard. It doesn’t know enough or when to stop.
The bear tires of his bicycle but he’s strapped on
with straps of silver and gold straps inlaid with scalps.
We are imperturbable as deer whose ancestors saw the last
man and passed on the sweet knowledge by shitting on graves.
<
br /> Let us arrange to meet sometime in transit, we’ll all take
the same train perhaps, Cendrars’s Express or the defunct Wabash.
Her swoon was officially interminable with unconvincing
geometric convulsions, no doubt her civic theater experience.
XVII
O Atlanta, roseate dawn, the clodhoppers, hillbillies, rednecks,
drunken dreams of murdering blacks; the gin mills still.
Our fried chicken and Key lime pie and rickets. To drain all
your swamps and touch a match, Seminoles forbidden drink.
Save the dogs everywhere. In France by actual count, Count
Blah Blah shot 885 pheasants in one day, his personal record.
There was a story of a lost child who remained lost & starved
to death hiding in a hollow log from both animals and searchers.
Cuba is off there beyond the Tortugas, forever invisible; Isle
of Pines where Crane wept, collecting tons of starfish and eels.
Her love was committed to horses and poets weighing less than
150 lbs. I weigh 200 and was not allowed into her Blue Fuck Room.
XVIII
I told the dark-haired girl to come down out of the apple
tree and take her medicine. In a dream I told her so.
We’re going to have to do something about the night. The tissue
won’t restore itself in the dark. I feel safe only at noon.
Waking. Out by the shed, their home, the Chicano cherry pickers
sing hymns on a hot morning, three guitars and a concertina.
We don’t need dime-store surrealists buying objects to write
about or all this up-against-the-wall nonsense in Art News.
Even in the wilderness, in Hell Roaring Creek Basin, in this
grizzly kingdom, I fear stepping into a hidden missile silo.
My friend has become crippled, back wrenched into an “S” like
my brain. We’ll go to Judah to wait for the Apocalypse.
XIX
We were much saddened by Bill Knott’s death.
When he reemerged as a hospital orderly we were encouraged.
Sad thoughts of different cuts of meat and how I own no
cattle and am not a rancher with a freezer full of prime beef.
A pure plump dove sits on the wire as if two wings emerged
from a russet pear, head tucked into the sleeping fruit.
Your new romance is full of nails hidden from the saw’s teeth,
a board under which a coral snake waits for a child’s hand.
I don’t want to die in a foreign land and was only in one
once, England, where I felt near death in the Cotswolds.
The cattle walked in the shallow water and birds flew
behind them to feed on the disturbed insects.
XX
Some sort of rag of pure language, no dictums but a bell
sound over clear water, beginning day no. 245 of a good year.
The faces made out of leaves and hidden within them, faces
that don’t want to be discovered or given names by anyone.
There was a virgin out walking the night during the plague when
the wolves entered Avila for carrion. The first took her neck.
The ninth month when everything is expected of me and nothing
can be told – September when I sit and watch the summer die.
She knelt while I looked out the car window at a mountain
(Emigrant Peak). We need girls and mountains frequently.
If I can clean up my brain, perhaps a stick of dynamite will
be needed, the Sibyl will return as an undiscovered lover.
XXI
He sings from the bottom of a well but she can hear him up
through the oat straw, toads, boards, three entwined snakes.
It quiets the cattle they say mythically as who alive has
tried it, their blank stares, cows digesting song. Rumen.
Her long hissing glides at the roller-skating rink, skates
to calves to thighs to ass in blue satin and organ music.
How could you be sane if 250,000 came to the Isle of Wight
to hear your songs near the sea and they looked like an ocean?
Darling companion. We’ll listen until it threatens and walls
fall to trumpet sounds or not and this true drug lifts us up.
That noise that came to us out in the dark, grizzly, leviathan,
drags the dead horse away to hollow swelling growls.
XXII
Maps. Maps. Maps. Venezuela, Keewanaw, Iceland open up
unfolding and when I get to them they’ll look like maps.
New pilgrims everywhere won’t visit tombs, need living
monuments to live again. But there are only tombs to visit.
They left her in the rain tied to the water with cobwebs,
stars stuck like burrs to her hair. I found her by her wailing.
It’s obvious I’ll never go to Petersburg and Akhmadulina
has married another in scorn of my worship of her picture.
You’re not fooling yourself – if you weren’t a coward you’d be
another target in Chicago, tremulous bull’s-eye for hog fever.
XXIII
I imagined her dead, killed by some local maniac who
crept upon the house with snowmobile at low throttle.
Alcohol that lets me play out hates and loves and fights;
in each bottle is a woman, the betrayer and the slain.
I insist on a one-to-one relationship with nature.
If Thursday I’m a frog it will have to be my business.
You are well. You grow taller. Friends think I’ve bought you
stilts but it is I shrinking, up past my knees in marl.
She said take out the garbage. I trot through a field with the
sack in my teeth. At the dump I pause to snarl at a rat.
XXIV
This amber light floating strangely upward in the woods – nearly
dark now with a warlock hooting through the tips of trees.
If I were to be murdered here as an Enemy of the State you would
have to bury me under that woodpile for want of a shovel.
She was near the window and beyond her breasts I could see
the burdock, nettles, goldenrod in a field beyond the orchard.
We’ll have to abandon this place and live out of the car again.
You’ll nurse the baby while we’re stuck in the snow out of gas.
The ice had entered the wood. It was twenty below and the beech
easy to split. I lived in a lean-to covered with deerskins.
I have been emptied of poison and returned home dried
out with a dirty bill of health and screaming for new wine.
XXV
O happy day! Said overpowered, had by it all and transfixed
and unforgetting other times that refused to swirl and flow.
The calendar above my head made of unnatural numbers, day
lasted five days and I expect a splendid year’s worth of dawn.
Rain pumps. Juliet in her tower and Gaspara Stampa again and
that girl lolling in the hammock with a fruit smell about her.
Under tag alder, beneath the ferns, crawling to know animals
for hours, how it looks to them down in this lightless place.
The girl out in the snows in the Laurentians saves her money
for Montreal and I am to meet her in a few years by “accident.”
Magdalen comes in a waking dream and refuses to cover me,
crying out for ice, release from time, for a cool spring.
XXVI
What will I do with seven billion cubic feet of clouds
in my head? I want to be wise and dispense it for quarters.
All these push-ups are making me a
muscular fatman. Love would
make me lean and burning. Love. Sorry the elevator’s full.
She was zeroed in on by creeps and forgot my meaningful glances
from the door. But then I’m walleyed and wear used capes.
She was built entirely of makeup, greasepaint all the way through
like a billiard ball is a billiard ball beneath its hard skin.
We’ll have to leave this place in favor of where the sun
is cold when seen at all, bones rust, it rains all day.
The cat is mine and so is the dog. You take the orchard,