by Jim Harrison
pistol shot. The Siege of Leningrad. Crows feasting on all of those
frozen German eyes. Good Russian crows that earned a meal putting
up with all of that insufferable racket of war. Curious crows watching
midnight purges, wary of owls, and the girl in the green dress
on the ground before a line of soldiers. She and the crow exchange
pitiless glances. She flaps her arms but is not wingéd. Maybe
there is one ancient crow that remembers the Czarina’s jeweled
sleigh, the ring of its small gold bells; and the sickly wingéd
horse in the cellar of the Winter Palace, product of a mad breeding
experiment for eventual escape, how it was dumped into the Neva
before the talons grew through the hooves, the marvel of it lost
in the uproar of those days, the proof of it in the bones somewhere
on the floor of the Baltic delta. But we all get lost in the course
of empire, which lacks the Brownian movement’s stability. We count
on iron men to stick to their guns. Our governments are weapons
of exhaustion. Poems fly out of yellow windows at night with a stall
factor just under a foot, beneath our knees and the pre–Fourth of
July corn in the garden. At least at that level radar can’t detect
them and they’re safe from State interference. We know perfectly
well you flapped your arms madly, unwingéd but craving a little flight.
29
We’re nearing the end of this homage that often resembles a
suicide note to a suicide. I didn’t mean it that way but how
often our hands sneak up on our throats and catch us unaware.
What are you doing here we say. Don’t squeeze so hard. The hands
inside the vodka bottle and on the accelerator, needles and coke-
sore noses. It’s not very attractive, is it? But now there is rain
on the tin roof, the world outside is green and leafy with bluebirds
this morning dive-bombing drowning worms from a telephone wire,
the baby laughing as the dog eats the thirty-third snake of the
summer. And the bodies on the streets and beaches. Girl bottoms!
Holy. Tummies in the sun! Very probably holy. Peach evidence almost
struggling for air! A libidinal stew that calls us to life however
ancient and basal. May they plug their lovely ears with their big
toes. God surely loves them to make them look that way and can I
do less than He at least in this respect. As my humble country
father said in our first birds-and-bees talk so many years ago: “That
thing ain’t just to pee through.” This vulgarity saves us as
certainly as our chauvinism. Just now in midafternoon I wanted
a tumbler of wine but John Calvin said, “You got up at noon. No wine
until you get your work done. You haven’t done your exercises to
suppress the gut the newspaper says women find most disgusting.
The fence isn’t mended and the neighbor’s cow keeps crawling through
in the night, stealing the fresh clover you are saving for Rachel
the mare when she drops her foal.” So the wine bottle remains
corked and Calvin slips through the floorboards to the crawl space
where he spends all of his time hating his body. Would these concerns
have saved you? Two daughters and a wife. Children prop our rotting
bodies with cries of earn earn earn. On occasion we are kissed. So odd
in a single green month to go from the closest to so far from death.
30
The last and I’m shrinking from the coldness of your spirit: that
chill lurid air that surrounds great Lenin in his tomb as if we
had descended into a cloud to find on the catafalque a man who has
usurped nature, isn’t dead any more than you or I are dead. Only
unlikely to meet and talk to our current forms. Today I couldn’t
understand words so I scythed ragweed and goldenrod before it could
go to seed and multiply. I played with god imagining how to hold His
obvious scythe that caught you, so unlike the others, aware and
cooperative. Is He glad to help if we’re willing? A boring question
since we’re so able and ingenious. Sappho’s sparrows are always
telling us that love will save us, some other will arrive to draw
us cool water, lie down with us in our private darkness and make
us well. I think not. What a fabulous lie. We’ve disposed of sparrows
and god, the death of color, those who are dominated by noon and
the vision of night flowing in your ears and eyes and down your
throat. But we didn’t mean to arrive at conclusions. Fifty years are
only a moment between this granary and a hanged man half the earth
away. You are ten years younger than my grandmother Hulda who still
sings Lutheran hymns and watches the Muskegon River flow. In whatever
we do, we do damage to ourselves; and in those first images there
were always cowboys or cossacks fighting at night, murdered animals
and girls never to be touched; dozing with head on your dog’s chest
you understand breath and believe in golden cities where you will
live forever. And that fatal expectancy – not comprehending that we
like our poems are flowers for the void. In those last days you
wondered why they turned their faces. Any common soul knew you
had consented to death, the only possible blasphemy. I write to
you like some half-witted, less courageous brother, unwilling to tease
those ghosts you slept with faithfully until they cast you out.
POSTSCRIPT
At 8:12 AM all of the watches in the world are being wound.
Which is not quite the same thing as all of the guitars on earth
being tuned at midnight. Or that all suicides come after the mail-
man when all hope is gone. Before the mailman, watches are wound,
windows looked through, shoes precisely tied, toothcare, the
attenuations of the hangover noted. Which is not the same as
the new moon after midnight or her bare feet stepping slowly toward
you and the snake easing himself from the ground for a meal.
The world is so necessary. Someone must execute stray dogs and
free the space they’re taking up. I can see people walking down
Nevsky Prospect winding their watches before you were discovered
too far above the ground, that mystical space that was somewhere
occupied by a stray dog or a girl in an asylum on her hands
and knees. A hanged face turns slowly from a plum to a lump of
coal. I’m winding my watch in antipathy. I see the cat racing
around the yard in a fantasy of threat. She’s preparing for
eventualities. She prizes the only prize. But we aren’t the cats
we once were thousands of years ago. You didn’t die with the
dignity of an animal. Today you make me want to tie myself to
a tree, stake my feet to earth herself so I can’t get away. It didn’t
come as a burning bush or pillar of light but I’ve decided to stay.
A LAST GHAZAL
Anconcito. The fisheater. Men were standing on cork rafts
on the water, visible between great Pacific swells.
So in Ecuador you decide to forget her in St. George in
Normandy. Try not to think of a white horse for several days.
All of the lilacs in the yard lie when they take you back to your
youth. There are white hairs on yo
ur chin, you can’t jump the fence.
What is this feeling that the police are ineluctably closing
in and you will miss many of your daughters’ birthdays.
There are still flowers of evil that want to lead you to another
life. We have photographic evidence of this in color, black-and-white.
Asleep and in a dreaming state near death I feel the awkward girl
in my head say please not now, I haven’t quite lived yet.
A DOMESTIC POEM FOR PORTIA
This is all it is.
These pictures cast up in front of me
with the mind’s various energies.
Hence so many flies in this old granary.
I’ve become one of those blackened beef sides
hanging in a South American market so when I sing
to myself I dispel a black cloud around my mouth
and when Linda brings iced tea she thinks I’m only
a photo in the National Geographic and drinks the tea
herself, musing he’s snuck off to the bar
and his five-year pool game.
This seems to be all it is.
Garcia sings Brown-eyed women and red grenadine.
Some mother-source of pleasure so that the guitar
mutes and revolves the vision of her as she rinses
her hair bending thigh-deep in the lake, her buttocks appear
to be struggling by themselves to get out of that bikini
with a faint glisten of sun at each cheek-top.
But when I talked to her she was thin in the head,
a magazine photo slipping through the air like
a stringless kite.
It’s apparent now that this is all there is.
This shabby wicker chair, music, the three PM
glass of red wine as a reward for sitting still
as our parents once instructed us. “Sit still!”
I want my head to go visit friends, traveling they call it
and without airports. Then little Anna up to her neck
in the lake for the first time, the ancient lineage
of swimming revealing itself in her two-year-old fat
body, eyes sparkle with awe and delight in this natural
house of water. Hearing a screech I step to the porch
and see three hawks above the neighbor’s pasture
chasing each other in battle or courtship.
This must be all there is.
At full rest with female-wet eyes becoming red wondering
falsely how in christ’s name am I going to earn
enough to keep us up in the country where the air
is sweet and green, an immense kingdom of water nearby
and five animals looking to me for food, and two daughters
and a mother assuming my strength. I courageously fix
the fence, mulch the tomatoes, fertilize the pasture –
a nickel-plated farmer. Wake up in the middle
of the night frightened, thinking nearly two decades
ago I took my vows and never dreamed I’d be responsible
for so many souls. Eight of them whispering provide.
This could very well be all that there is.
And I’m not unhappy with it. A check in the mail that will
take us through another month. I see in the papers
I’ve earned us “lower class”! How strange. Waiting
for Rachel’s foal to drop. That will make nine. Provide.
Count my big belly ten. But there’s an odd grace in being
an ordinary artist. A single tradition clipping the heads
off so many centuries. Those two drunks a millennium ago on
a mountaintop in China – laughing over the beauty of the moment.
At peace despite their muddled brains. The male dog, a trifle
stupid, rushes through the door announcing absolutely nothing.
He has great confidence in me. I’m hanging on to nothing today and
with confidence, a sureness that the very air between our bodies,
the light of what we are, has to be enough.
MISSY 1966–1971
I want to be worthy of this waking dream –
floating above
the August landscape
in a coffin with my dog
who’s just died from fibroid cancer.
Yes. We’ll be up there and absorb
the light of stars and phosphorus
like the new army telescopic sights
and the light hanging captive
in clouds
and the light glittering upward
from the water
and porch lights
from the few trucks & cars
at 3 AM
and one lone airliner.
Grief holding us safe in a knot we’ll float
over every mile we covered, birch clump, thorn apple,
wild cherry trees and aspen in search of grouse,
your singular white figure fixed then as Sirius the Dog Star.
I think this crazed boy striking
out at nothing
wants to join you
so homeward
bound.
FOUR MATRICES
1. HOME
New Matrices, all ice. Fixed here and solidly.
What was that song? My grave is hiding from me.
I’ll go to that juniper thicket across
the road. Or stay here. Or go. Or stay.
A contessa. A girl on a roan horse behind
the goldenrod. The barn. The whiskey shelf.
Count options, false starts. And glooms of love,
the lover’s next-room boredom. Juliet’s in Verona.
Juliets are always in Verona after a few days.
Or trout and grouse, wading & walking after them.
Days of it. Dis. Dis. Dis. Dante called it,
this actual hell, this stillness. Lasting
how long? Waking is visionary. I’ll awake but
to sleep again, new and bitter each new time.
2. COUNTING ARIZONA
Amphora in rocks. Kachina of fur and rust. The land
here seemed burned out & wasn’t; just no lushness
of green, verdigris, leaves in sweet rot or swamps.
I don’t belong and won’t, perhaps only less foreign
than the natives. INDIANS: Zuni, Navajo, Jicarilla,
Papago, Mescalero Apache, Hopi. Aliens. That range is
owned by cone-nosed beetles, cattle, scorpion and snake
and the mines. A few deer, javelinas, quail, mountain thrush
and jackrabbit. Frightened. I count and point. Beware.
Just off the road’s shoulder is wilderness and finally
Mexico and peopleless. And too much sun. I want to go home.
3. HOME
Cores. Knots. A vortex around which nothing swirls
or moves. Here then. Where I am now and can’t seem
to move, some perfect cripple; a suspended brain.
It was cold, it is cold. It will be cold. And dry.
A root hits tablerock, curls upward, winds around
itself until it becomes a noose. Obvious! Obvious!
All the better. Simple things: just now a horse walked
past the window. I was naked when I carried the dying dog
to the couch. And weeping with alcohol and rock and
cold and stillness, horses and roots, unmoving brain.
4. THE SEA
Screw-gumption despite cold rain and clouds drifting below treetops.
Poor thing, strung up by false & falser delights; not lost,
a word that weighs nothing except lost to one’s self, floating.
How light these imagined loves, floating too, from the head
in a night’s sleep when the body’s heat is nonmental.
It’s a happy mage that walks through the world with his eyes
e
arthward using clouds only for a pick-me-up. The brain’s not
a solid thing he thinks eating calf’s brains. But butchers
are solid people. Somewhere between butcher and that unstable
weight is ballad, some song, though not moving to our obvious
harmonies. Count those waterbirds and beware, costumed as women;
part air and part water. But we are drawn to them as clumsy
rowboats sunk in fifty fathoms. After drifting the oceans for years.
NORTH AMERICAN IMAGE CYCLE
to Tom McGuane
The boy stood in the burning house. Set it up
that way, and with all windows open. I don’t want
a roof. I want to fill all those spaces where we
never allow words to occur.
Crudities:
implausible as this brilliantly cold
day in late June, barely forty. Two horses outside
the granary door, braced leaning into the wind
not even trying to figure it out.
And the great shattering cold waves
On Good Harbor Bay, the sea permanently bleak;
a squall line a hundred miles long, the island a dull
ugly green, and only one brief sweep of yellow light.
It is nearly against nature and that is why I love
it and would not trade it for all your princely heart.
The snail is beautiful, nearly Persian. Do we dwell in
or on beauty? The Belgian mare in my barn weighs 2300 lbs.
but thinks of herself oddly as woman, very feminine and shy
tossing her flaxen mane then rolling hugely & wantonly
in the snow. She takes the proffered apple not with her teeth
but delicately with her lips.
Phenomenon. Agonies. Mostly unshared. Dear Friends
the nightmare I recounted was pastel. I believed in numbers.
What is so crisp and intense as a number? Not our bodies
in their average frenzies. Fortunately the heart