by Jim Harrison
them shed their dresses in apartments. See those
steam pipes running along the ceiling. The rope.
3
I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up
Dr. Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there
with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and
perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present
all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are
never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted
so I picked up Dr. Zhivago again but the TV was on
with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in
the early history of Australia. But then the movie
was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping
and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with
the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could
not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin
glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared
as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is
all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from
the rope – We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota
halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck
will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted
again and read the poems at the end of Dr. Zhivago and
just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage
away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red
robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.
4
I am four years older than you but scarcely an unwobbling
pivot. It was no fun sitting around being famous, was it?
I’ll never have to learn that lesson. You find a page torn
out of a book and read it feeling that here you might find
the mystery of print in such phrases as “summer was on the
way” or “Gertrude regarded him somewhat quizzically.” Your
Sagane was a fraud. Love poems to girls you never met living
in a country you never visited. I’ve been everywhere to no
particular purpose. And am well past love but not love poems.
I wanted to fall in love on the coast of Ecuador but the girls
were itsy-bitsy and showers are not prominent in that area.
Unlike Killarney where I also didn’t fall in love the girls
had good teeth. As in the movies the Latin girls proved to be
spitfires with an endemic shanker problem. I didn’t fall in love
in Palm Beach or Paris. Or London. Or Leningrad. I wanted to fall
in love at the ballet but my seat was too far back to see faces
clearly. At Sadko a pretty girl was sitting with a general
and did not exchange my glance. In Normandy I fell in love but
had colitis and couldn’t concentrate. She had a way of not paying
any attention to me that could not be misunderstood. That is
a year’s love story. Except Key West where absolutely nothing
happened with romantic overtones. Now you might understand why
I drink and grow fat. When I reach three hundred pounds there
will be no more love problems, only fat problems. Then I will
write reams of love poems. And if she pats my back a cubic yard
of fat will jiggle. Last night I drank a hundred-proof quart
and looked at a photo of my sister. Ten years dead. Show me a
single wound on earth that love has healed. I fed my dying dog
a pound of beef and buried her happy in the barnyard.
5
Lustra. Officially the cold comes from Manitoba;
yesterday at sixty knots. So that the waves mounted
the breakwater. The first snow. The farmers and carpenters
in the tavern with red, windburned faces. I am in there
playing the pinball machine watching all those delicious
lights flutter, the bells ring. I am halfway through
a bottle of vodka and am happy to hear Manitoba
howling outside. Home for dinner I ask my baby daughter
if she loves me but she is too young to talk. She cares
most about eating as I care most about drinking. Our wants
are simple as they say. Still when I wake from my nap
the universe is dissolved in grief again. The baby is sleeping
and I have no one to talk my language. My breath is shallow
and my temples pound. Vodka. Last October in Moscow I taught
a group of East Germans to sing “Fuck Nixon,” and we were
quite happy until the bar closed. At the newsstand I saw a
picture of Bella Akhmadulina and wept. Vodka. You would have
liked her verses. The doorman drew near, alarmed. Outside
the KGB floated through the snow like arctic bats.
Maybe I belong there. They won’t let me print my verses. On the
night train to Leningrad I will confess everything to someone.
All my books are remaindered and out of print. My face in
the mirror asks me who I am and says I don’t know. But stop
this whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches
around my house wave in the wind. They are women standing
on their heads. Their leaves on the ground today are small
saucers of snow from which I drink with endless thirst.
6
Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple.
The sun was hot and I felt an unbounded sickness with earth.
A single October day began to last a year. You can’t fuck
your life away, I thought. But you can! Listening in Nepal
to those peahens scream in the evening. Then, through the glade,
lordly he enters, his ass a ten-foot fan, a painting by a crazed
old master. Look, they are human. Heads the size of two knuckles.
But returning to her buttery appleness and autumn, my dead friend.
We cannot give our lives over to women. Kneeling there under that
vulgar sugar maple tree I couldn’t breathe and with a hundred
variations of red above me and against my mouth. She said I’m
going away to Oregon perhaps. I said that I’m going myself to
California where I hear they sleep out every night. So that
ended that and the fan was tucked neatly and the peahens’ screams
were heard no more in the land and old ladies and old men slept
soundly again and threw away their cotton earplugs and the earth
of course was soaked with salt and August passed without a single
ear of corn. Of course this was only one neighborhood. Universality
is disgusting. But you had your own truly insurmountable horrors
with that dancer, lacking all wisdom as you did. Your critic said
you were “often revolted by your sensuality.” He means
all of that endless fucking of course. Tsk tsk. Put one measure
against another and how rarely they fuse, and how almost never is
there any fire and how often there is only boredom and a craving
for cigarettes, a sandwich, or a drink. Particularly a drink.
I am drunk because I no longer can love. I make love and I’m
writing on a blackboard. Once it was a toteboard, a gun handle
until I myself became a notch. And a notch, to be obvious, is a
nothing. This all must pass as a monk’s tale, a future lie.
7
Death thou comest when I had thee least in mind, said Everyman
years ago in England. Can’t get around much anymore. So it’s
really a terrible surprise unless like you we commit suicide.
I
worry some that the rope didn’t break your neck, but that
you dangled there strangling from your body’s weight. Such
physics can mean a rather important matter of three or four
minutes. Then I would guess there was a moment of black peacefulness
then you were hurtling in space like a mortar. Who can say
if a carcass smiles, if the baggage is happy at full rest. The
child drowns in a predictable puddle or inside the plastic bag
from which you just took your tuxedo. The evening is certainly
ruined and we can go on from there but that too is predictable.
I want to know. I have no explanations for myself but if someone
told me that my sister wasn’t with Jesus they would get an
ass-kicking. There’s a fascinating tumor called a melanoma
that apparently draws pigment from surrounding tissue until
it’s black as coal. That fatal lump of coal tucked against the
spine. And of all things on earth a bullet can hit human
flesh is one of the least resistant. It’s late autumn and this
is an official autumnal mood, a fully sanctioned event in which
one may feel the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. But
as poets we would prefer to have a star fall on us, (that meteor
got me in the gizzard!), or lightning strike us and not while we’re
playing golf but perhaps in a wheat field while we’re making
love in a thunderstorm, or a tornado take us away outside of
Mingo, Kansas, like Judy Garland unfortunately. Or a rainbow
suffocate us. Or skewered dueling that mighty forces of anti-
art. Maybe in sleep as a Gray Eminence. A painless sleep of course.
Or saving a girl from drowning who turns out to be a mermaid.
8
I cleaned the granary dust off your photo with my shirtsleeve.
Now that we are tidy we can wait for the host to descend
presumably from the sky as that seems to exhaust the alternatives.
You had a nice summer in the granary. I was out there with you
every day in June and July writing one of my six-week wonders,
another novel. Loud country music on the phonograph, wasps
and bees and birds and mice. The horses looked in the window
every hour or so, curious and rather stupid. Chief Joseph stared
down from the wall at both of us, a far nobler man than
we ever thought possible. We can’t lead ourselves and he led
a thousand with a thousand horses a thousand miles. He was a god
and had three wives when one is usually more than enough for
a human. These past weeks I have been organizing myself into
my separate pieces. I have the limberness of a man twice my age
and this is as good a time as any to turn around. Joseph was
very understanding, incidentally, when the Cavalry shot so many
of the women and children. It was to be expected. Earth is
full of precedents. They hang around like underground trees
waiting for their chance. The fish swam around four years solid
in preparation for August the seventh, 1972, when I took his life
and ate his body. Just as we may see our own ghosts next to
us whose shapes we will someday flesh out. All of this suffering
to become a ghost. Yours held a rope, manila, straight from
the tropics. But we don’t reduce such glories to a mudbath.
The ghost giggles at genuflections. You can’t buy him a drink.
Out in a clearing in the woods the other day I got up on a
stump and did a little dance for mine. We know the most fright-
ening time is noon. The evidence says I’m halfway there, such
wealth I can’t give away, thirty-four years of seconds.
9
What if I own more paper clips than I’ll ever use in this
lifetime? My other possessions are shabby: the house half-
painted, the car without a muffler, one dog with bad eyes
and the other dog a horny moron. Even the baby has a rash on
her neck but then we don’t own humans. My good books were
stolen at parties long ago and two of the barn windows are
broken and the furnace is unreliable and field mice daily
feed on the wiring. But the new foal appears healthy though
unmanageable, crawling under the fence and chased by my wife
who is stricken by the flu, not to speak of my own body which
has long suffered the ravages of drink and various nervous
disorders that make me laugh and weep and caress my shotguns.
But paper clips. Rich in paper clips to sort my writings which
fill so many cartons under the bed. When I attach them I say
it’s your job after all to keep this whole thing together. And
I used them once with a rubber band to fire holes into the
face of the president hanging on the office wall. We have freedom.
You couldn’t do that to Brezhnev much less Stalin on whose
grave Mandelstam sits proudly in the form of the ultimate
crow, a peerless crow, a crow without comparison on earth.
But the paper clips are a small comfort like meeting someone
fatter than myself and we both wordlessly recognize the fact
or meeting someone my age who is more of a drunk, more savaged
and hag-ridden until they are no longer human and seeing
them on the street I wonder how their heads which are only
wounds balance on the top of their bodies. A manuscript of
a novel sits in front of me held together with twenty clips.
It is the paper equivalent of a duck and a company far away
has bought this perhaps beautiful duck and my time is free again.
10
It would surely be known for years after as the day I shot
a cow. Walking out of the house before dawn with the sky an icy
blackness and not one star or cockcrow or shiver of breeze, the rifle
barrel black and icy to the touch. I walked a mile in the dark
and a flushed grouse rose louder than any thunderclap. I entered
a neck of a woodlot I’d scouted and sat on a stump waiting for
a deer I intended to kill. But then I was dressed too warmly
and had a formidable hangover with maybe three hours of sleep so
I slept again seeing a tin open-fronted café in Anconcito down
on the coast of Ecuador and the eyes of a piglet staring at me as
I drank my mineral water dazed with the opium I had taken for
la turista. Crippled syphilitic children begging, one little boy
with a tooth as long as a forefinger, an ivory tusk which would
be pulled on maturity and threaded as an amulet ending up finally
in Moscow in a diplomatic pouch. The boy would explore with his
tongue the gum hole for this Russian gift. What did he know about
Russia. Then carrying a naked girl in the water on my shoulders
and her short hairs tickled the back of my neck with just the suggestion
of a firm grip behind them so if I had been stupid enough to turn
around I might have suffocated at eighteen and not written you
any letters. There were bristles against my neck and hot breath
in my hair. It must be a deer smelling my hair so I wheeled and shot.
But it was a cow and the muzzle blast was blue in the gray light.
She bawled horribly and ran in zigzags. I put her away with a shot
to the head. What will I do with this cow? It’s a guernsey and she
won’t be milked this morning. I knelt
and stared into her huge eyeball,
her iris making a mirror so I combed my hair and thought about the
whole dreary mess. Then I walked backward through a muddy orchard
so I wouldn’t be trailed, got in my car and drove to New York nonstop.
11
for Diane W.
No tranquil pills this year wanting to live peeled as they
described the nine throats of Cerberus. Those old greek names
keep popping up. You can tell we went to college and our sleep
is troubled. There are geographical equivalents for exotic tropes
of mind; living peeled was the Desert Inn in Tucson talking with D.W.
about love and art with so much pain my ears rung and the breath
came short. And outside the fine desert air wasn’t fine anymore:
the indians became kachina dolls and a girl was tortured daily
for particular reasons. This other is our Akhmatova and often we want
to hide from her – seasoned as she is in so many hells. But why paint
her for one of the dead who knew her pungency of love, the unforgivable
low-tide smell of it, how few of us bear it for long before reducing
it to a civil act. You were odd for a poet attaching yourself
to a woman no less a poet than yourself. It still starts with
the dance. In the end she probably strangled you and maybe back
in Ryazan there was a far better bird with less extravagant plumage.
But to say I’m going to spend the day thinking wisely about
women is to say I’m going to write an indomitably great poem before
lunch or maybe rule the world by tomorrow dawn. And I couldn’t
love one of those great SHES – it’s far too late and they are far
too few to find anyway though that’s a driveling excuse. I saw one
in a tree and on a roof. I saw one in a hammock and thigh-deep
in a pond. I saw one out in the desert and sitting under a willow
by the river. All past tense you notice and past haunting but not
past caring. What did she do to you and did you think of her when
your terrible shadow fell down the wall. I see that creature sitting
on the lawn in Louveciennes, the mistress of a superior secret. We