by Jim Harrison
doesn’t melt as wax does at the sight of a kitten.
Place a kitten near a candle when bored.
In a dream I saw Spicer’s body hanging from a hundred feet
of clothesline rope under the Golden Gate. Ask Weldon Kees
and Lew Welch to make contact, if alive or not. Crane’s jump
in all things, a raincoat, borrowed. When I fish the Marquesas
every year I say to the passing fish, have you seen Crane’s bones?
How deep and where do they lie and are they drawn together or
spread and are they peaceful on the bottom?
Are these horses less wonderful for my daughter having to shovel
horseshit an hour a day? The teacher would say someone has
to do it and go on to the social contract before a lunch of
cheese sandwiches, tomato soup and chalk dust à la mode.
But we are thinking of horses not teachers. And of the shovel
and the dreaded weight at the end that is less useful than
the much ruminated cow manure. Throw it out the door.
Sally, Nancy, Belle, Saud & Tramp watch with soft curious
horse eyes.
Oooooooo, he said to himself. That night of wonderment.
The head might explode from it. Certainly the heart beats
in circles like a Masarati cam. The insistence of physical
love and she didn’t know her head was in an ashtray and
afterward didn’t seem to care.
More mad dogs and fewer streetlights, Mr. Nixon. That advice
will cost you a hundred bucks, has been billed for that amount.
Date check after the first for tax reasons. The mad
dogs can be gotten from Spain, cheap. And everyone loves
to throw stones at streetlights.
And my puppy is over her kidney infection, diagnosed
as chronic & fatal. Saved from the gas chamber. I salute
the technology of antibiotics. All dogs are in particular
as was Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry. He said drunkenly
near dawn O let her sleep with us during her last days and
let her wounds become my own.
First sighting:
She was up in the apple tree with one leg hanging
and the other drawn under her, sidesaddle on the branch.
Her face was bare of features and being an artist of sorts
I filled them in. It was deadly serious and I wanted
to ask someone what she was doing so nudely up in the apple
tree behind the barn, but had no one to ask and the mouth
I’d designed was too fresh on her face to open; so I stared
up and noticed she didn’t lack the truly important features of
her sex but any desire was constrained by fear. So I sat
in the grass and dozed from what I’d been drinking that afternoon
waking to hear her sing no mantra but some ancient lute song,
and seeing her again as she dropped from the tree to my side
I thought her bare feet were cloven a bit too obviously.
At four in the morning my body bumped against the ceiling.
Thank Jesus for ceilings or I would have been lost to earth,
rather, earth lost to me as she doesn’t know me well.
Remember her cheers? How you loved the cheerleader far beyond
desperation. How you nearly threw yourself into Niagara Falls
unprotected by a rubber barrel on your high-school senior trip.
Now you have a permanent rubber barrel around you but you
no longer love the cheerleader.
He sang I’m talking through a hat that isn’t mine. It’s
Jackson Pollock’s, given him by Pollock’s brother, Charles,
and there is blood on the rim, his own not Pollock’s. This talisman
was lost in a bar somewhere, anywhere in America, and is
worn now by a dump-picker who found it among the garbage.
Appropriate! As both of them, one so great and the other so
small, treated themselves like garbage. sanctus detritus redivivus
I felt myself floating toward the shadow of the dreamer I once
was. I said that I had become too old to dream and the androgynous
dreamer said let’s marry anyway and be unhappy but joyous
in our dreams. There were poems before books on earth.
The stewardess said You’re a poet?
When I think of a poet I think of someone sitting
around all day humming Got a date with a daydream.
This fat & sexless life.
I mourned Portia’s unfair operation. Then the horse
ate her garden to ground level. The horse’s name
happened to be Rex.
We must not think of our country as a ten-trillion-dollar
blowjob no matter how the idea tempts us.
Overheard story in Montana bar: She thought when she lost
her teeth we’d divorce and she cried a lot; so I said
to her we won’t divorce but we’ll marry someone else. The vaunted
simplicity of cowboys who are really cossacks – the horse
rhythms obviously affecting the brain chemistry. A slavic tribe
with ambivalent affection for guns & ewes, mares & drudgery.
He became humbler with his journalism, bought a porkpie hat
at Kresge’s and wore an inoperable malachite pencil over
his left ear as his only visible rebellion.
The green green grass of home is owned by another now
and I’m not allowed on the property for my ounce of sentiment.
In the Montana whorehouse the madam yells “Burma”
through the door to the girl and her customer
when the time is up, circa twenty minutes for twenty
dollars, the value being established by Nixon’s Price
Commission on infolding nightflowers, petaled creatures.
So the customer who is a language buff looks down
at his shoes, all that he’s wearing, and thinks:
How did I get my pants off over my shoes? Has a genuine
miracle happened? Why do they use Burma as a signal
rather than Peking or Topeka or French fries? On the dresser
is a photo of the girl with a child, her son in a sailor
suit. Does he cry Burma in the night to get his mother
home? A tape cassette playing Wilson Pickett. Can my
future be traced on those stretch marks and if she were
wet would they form small rivers, minnows and all?
That twenty was hard-earned by art to be printed in New York
at $5.95 net. Will she buy him another sailor suit?
The room is hot. Perhaps during the C-minus transport
the house has been moved to Burma and outside is a green
hell with lianas masquerading as vipers and vice versa.
On a tray there is some dental floss, Moon Drop lotion
and a cordless vibrator, an aerosol can of Cupid’s Quiver.
I really didn’t want to go to Burma this afternoon, ma’am,
he thinks. I’ll miss supper and fishing the evening hatch.
Second sighting:
She was up on the roof when I went up to check
the texture of the night and to generally be an ordinary
poet who muses about the Boston skyline from an Alston roof.
She was leaning in the shadows against the none-too-solid
cornice but had no fears of being aerial. Her sex was soft
as a small mound of coal dust, the material
of spiderwebs, a dove’s head.
Start with seven for luck:
homo erectus, erect of course,
a compass, viper, wand or club,
gun, usual knife with any her or she
in
repose for imagined punishment.
See him shudder, “throb” the books say,
quake, his flanks with a doggish bend.
Her eyes stare past his ear, they are
a green not found in nature and three
feet deep. Nothing need be forgiven.
Awake. A dab of numero uno in the smoking
pipe. The whole table in Montana loves
each other. They are relaxing from a long
day’s sleep. The women are beautiful
and clean, the men young and ambitious.
They verge on taking over something not quite
comprehensible. The dance begins. Libidinous.
A horse’s nose is pressed against the kitchen
window. It seems the very room wants to rise
up and screw but these are the sons and daughters
of an entre act, of Calvin, pre-Korean, middle Nam.
And their eyes are pink with hopeless energy.
He throws a fifty-lire piece in the fountain
and wants to tell his outrageous wish but they
won’t listen. The wish won’t count if you tell it
she says. He broods. The air is full of these god-
damn wops and their filthy pigeons. What good
is a wish that can’t be told, that was wished
to anger those who won’t hear it. Give me the single
raindrop that fell through the hole in the pagan
temple as my bride. Wishes must be phrased in old-time
languages, a sort of fatigued Episcopalian; here
and there it wasn’t: that pinochle become the national
sport of the U.S.A.; that dysentery disappear straightaway
from earth; that the girl hidden in New York change
her silly predilection for her sisters, fall like
rain through the roof of a pagan temple on this gentle soul.
Grease density
Moon tup
Pink eye
Yellow book
Muddy horse (he fell in the pond)
Great big stomach from reading cookbooks
The child fell
The fly drank then backstroked on the skin of wine then perished
It is a true suntan because her ass is white
Red rock with green lichen
Green ground with red lichen
Since Bob jogs he snores less says his wife
Yes the hoopless barrel will break when filled
We fear the vicious Brazilian honeybee
Her eroticism is fungoid as in fungus
Some of us are aliens from god knows where
The midwest barren without good shellfish
The announcement said get to the high ground
but we were unable to move while the waters
crept up to the window, peeked in, then receded.
There was a fish near the mailbox, a lake trout
with two immature lamprey eels dangling from
their teethhold on the stomach.
For five days the moon was red from the dust storm.
It lost its novelty. Then on the sixth the moon
was pink and regained its novelty. On the seventh
it disappeared though reports from Perth, Australia,
established a white bladder-shaped object in the sky.
Third sighting:
Is she the black-crowned night heron
our lady of the marshes
hidden at the far end of the lake
the verge of an enormous swamp
hearing her call amid stippled shadow ten thousand tree frogs
the vision of eros as water bird
emerging from the green brush near midnight
stately wading legs
RETURNING TO EARTH
for Guy & Anna
What forgotten reverie, what initiation,
it may be, separated wisdom from the
monastery and, creating Merlin,
joined it to passion?
–W.B. Yeats, A Vision
1977
RETURNING TO EARTH
She
pulls the sheet of this dance
across me
then runs, staking
the corners far out at sea.
So curious in the middle of America, the only “locus”
I know, to live and love at great distance. (Growing
up, everyone is willing to drive seventy miles to see
a really big grain elevator, ninety miles for a dance,
two hundred to look over a pair of Belgian mares
returning the next day for the purchase, three hundred
miles to see Hal Newhouser pitch in Detroit, eight
hundred miles to see the Grand Ole Opry, a thousand
miles to take the mongoloid kid to a Georgia faith healer.)
I hitched two thousand for my first glimpse of the Pacific.
When she first saw the Atlantic she said near Key Largo,
“I thought it would be bigger.”
I widowed my small
collection of magic
until it poisoned itself with longing.
I have learned nothing.
I give orders to the rain.
I tried to catch the tempest in a gill net.
The stars seem a little closer lately.
I’m no longer afraid to die
but is this a guidepost of lunacy?
I intend to see the ten hundred million worlds Mañjushri
passed through before he failed to awaken the maiden.
Taking off and landing are the dangerous times.
I was commanded in a dream to dance.
O Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself.
Ikkyū’s ten years near the whorehouses
shortens distances, is truly palpable;
and in ten years you will surely
get over your itch. Or not.
Don’t waste yourself staring at the moon.
All of those moon-staring-rear-view-mirror deaths!
Study the shadow of the horse turd in the grass.
There must be a difference between looking at a picture
of a bird and the actual bird (barn swallow)
fifteen feet from my nose on the shed eaves.
That cloud SSW looks like the underside
of a river in the sky.
O I’m lucky
got a car that starts almost every day
tho’ I want a new yellow Chevy pickup
got two letters today
and I’d rather have three
have a lovely wife
but want all the pretty ones
got three white hawks in the barn
but want a Himalayan eagle
have a planet in the basement
but would prefer the moon in the granary
have the northern lights
but want the Southern Cross.
The stillness of this earth
which we pass through
with the precise speed of our dreams.
I’m getting very old. If I were a mutt
in dog years I’d be seven, not stray so far.
I am large. Tarpon my age are often large
but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise
my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343.
Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses,
but I have dropped any notion of explaining
to them why I read so much. To be mysterious
is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered
lately that my subjects do not live a life,
but are life itself. They do not recognize
the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship.
To them I am pretty much a fellow creature.
So distances: yearns for Guayaquil and Petersb
urg,
the obvious Paris and Rome,
restraint in the Cotswolds, perfumes of Arusha,
Entebbe bristling with machine guns,
also Ecuadorian & Ethiopian airports,
border guards always whistling in boredom
and playing with machine guns;
all to count the flies on the lion’s eyelids
and the lioness hobbling in deep grass
lacking one paw, to scan the marlin’s caudal fin
cutting the Humboldt swell, an impossible scissors.
There must be a cricket named Zagreus
in the granary tucked under a roof beam,
under which my three-year-old daughter
boogies madly,
her first taste of the Grateful Dead;
she is well out of her mind.
Rain on the tin roof which covers a temple,
rain on my walking head which covers a temple,
rain covering my laugh shooting
toward the woods for no reason,
rain splattering in pasture’s heat
raising cones of dust,
and off the horses’ backs,
on oriole’s nest in ash tree,
on my feet poking out the door,
testing the endurance of our actual pains,
biting hard against the sore tooth.
She’s rolling in the bear fat
She’s rolling in the sand
She’s climbing a vine
She’s boarding a jet
She flies into the distance wearing blue shoes