by Jim Harrison
Having become the person I most feared in Childhood –
A DRUNKARD. They were pointed out to us
in our small town: oil workers, some poor farmers
(on Saturday marketing), a mechanic, a fired teacher.
They’d stumble when walking, sometimes yell
on the street at noon, wreck their old cars;
their wives would request special prayers in church,
and the children often came to school in winter
with no socks. We took up a collection to buy
the dump-picker’s daughter shoes. Also my uncles
are prone to booze, also my father though it was well-
controlled, and now my fifteen-year war with the bottle
with whiskey removing me from the present
in a sweet, laughing haze, removing anger, anxiety,
instilling soft grandness, decorating ugliness
and reaffirming my questionable worth. SEE: Olson’s
fingers touch his thumb, encircling the bottle – he
gulps deeply, talking through one night into the next
afternoon, talking, basking in Gorton’s fishy odor.
So many of my brethren seem to die of busted guts.
Now there is a measured truce with maps and lines
drawn elegantly against the binge, concessions,
measurings, hesitant steps. My favorite two bars
are just north and barely south of the 45th parallel.
I no longer believe in the idea of magic,
christs, the self, metal buddhas, bibles.
A horse is only the space his horseness requires.
If I pissed in the woods would a tree see my ear
fall off and would the ear return to the body
on the morning of the third day? Do bo trees
ever remember the buddhas who’ve slept beneath them?
I admit that yesterday I built an exploratory altar.
Who can squash his delight in incomprehension?
So on a piece of old newspaper I put an earthworm
on a maple leaf, the remains of a bluebird after
the cat was finished – head and feet, some dog hair,
shavings from when we trimmed the horses’ hooves,
a snakeskin, a stalk of ragweed, a gourd,
a lemon, a cedar splinter, a nonsymbolic doorknob,
a bumblebee with his juice sucked out by a wasp.
Before this altar I invented a doggerel mantra
it is this it is this it is this
It is very hard to give birds advice.
They are already members of eternity.
In their genes they have both compass
and calendar. Their wing bones are hollow.
We are surprised by how light a dead bird is.
But what am I penetrating?
Only that it seems nothing convinces
itself or anyone else reliably
of its presence. It is in the distance.
No Persephone in my life,
Ariadne, Helen, Pocahontas,
Evangeline of the Book House
but others not less extraordinary who step
lightly into the dream life, refusing to leave:
girl in a green dress,
woman lolling in foot-deep Caribbean,
woman on balcony near Vatican,
girl floating across Copley Square in 1958,
mythologized woman in hut in 1951,
girl weeping in lilacs,
woman slapping my face,
girl smoking joint in bathtub looking at big toe,
slender woman eating three lobsters,
woman who blew out her heart with cocaine,
girl livid and deformed in dreams,
girl breaking the window in rage,
woman sick in hotel room,
heartless woman in photo –
not heartless but a photo.
My left eye is nearly blind.
No words have ever been read with it.
Not that the eye is virgin – thirty years ago
it was punctured by glass. In everything
it sees a pastel mist. The poster of Chief Joseph
could be King Kong, Hong Kong, a naked lady riding
a donkey into Salinas, Kansas. A war atrocity.
This eye is the perfect art critic. This eye
is a perfect lover saying bodies don’t matter,
it is the voice. This eye can make a lightbulb
into the moon when it chooses. Once a year I open
it to the full moon out in the pasture and yell,
white light white light.
A half-dozen times a day
I climb through the electric fence
on my way and back to my study
in the barnyard. I have to be cautious.
I have learned my true dimensions,
how far my body sticks out from my brain.
We are each
the only world
we are going to get.
I don’t want to die. It would certainly
inconvenience my wife and daughters.
I am sufficiently young that it would help
my publisher unpack his warehouse of books.
It would help me stop drinking and lose weight.
I could talk to Boris Pasternak.
He never saw the film.
Wanting to pull the particular nail
that will collapse the entire house
so that there is nothing there,
not even a foundation: a rubble heap,
no sign at all, just grass, weeds and trees
among which you cannot find a shard of masonry,
which like an arrowhead might suggest
an entire civilization.
She was lying back in the rowboat.
It was hot.
She tickled me with her toes.
She picked lily pads.
She watched mating dragonflies.
“How many fish below us?”
“O a hundred or so.”
“It would be fun to fall in love with someone.”
The rower continued his rowing.
Why be afraid of a process you’re
already able to describe with precision?
To say you don’t believe in it
is to say that you’re not.
It doesn’t care so why should you?
You’ve been given your body back
without a quarrel. See this vision
of your imagined body float toward you:
it disappears into you without a trace.
You feel full with a fullness again.
Your dimensions aren’t scattered in dreams.
This fat pet bird I’ve kept so many years,
a crow with a malformed wing
tucked against its side, no doubt a vestigial fin:
I taught him early to drink from my whiskey
or wineglass in the shed but he prefers wine.
He flies only in circles of course
but when he drinks he flies in great
circles miles wide, preferring bad days
with low cold clouds looking like leper brains.
I barely hear his whimps & howls: O jesus
the pain O shit it hurts O god let it end.
He drags himself through air mostly landing
near a screen door slamming, a baby’s cry,
a dog’s bark, a forest fire, a sleeping coyote.
These fabulous memories of earth!
Not to live in fancy
these short hours: let shadows
fall from walls as shadows, nothing else.
New York is exactly
dead center
in New York.
Not to indulge this heartsickness as failure.
Did I write three songs or seven
or half-a-one, one line, phrases?
A single word
that might hang in the sti
ll, black air
for more than a few moments?
Then the laughter comes again.
We sing it away.
What short wicks
we fuel with our blood.
Disease!
My prostate beating & pulsing
down there like a frightened turkey’s heart.
A cold day,
low ceiling.
A cloud the size
of a Greyhound bus
just hit the house.
Offenses this summer against Nature:
poured iced tea on a garter snake’s head
as he or she dozed on the elm stump,
pissed on a bumblebee (inattentive),
kicked a thousand wasps to death in my slippers.
Favors done this summer for Nature:
let the mice keep their nest in the green station wagon,
let Rachel the mare breathe her hot damp horse breath
against my bare knee when she wanted to,
tried without success to get the song sparrow out
of the shed where she had trapped herself fluttering
along the cranny under the assumption that the way out
is always the way up, and her wings lie to her
with each separate beat against the ceiling saying
there is no way down and out,
there is no way down and out,
the open door back into the world.
Coleridge’s pet spider
he says is very intellectual,
spins webs of deceit
straight out of his big
hanging ass.
Mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx,
crest, mane, beard, yellow, purple, green,
a large fierce, gregarious baboon –
has small wit but ties himself to a typewriter
with wolfish and bloody appetite.
He is just one, thousands will follow,
something true to be found among the countless
millions of typed pages. There’s a picture
of him in Tibet though no mandrills have been known
to live there. He wants to be with his picture
though there’s no way to get there. So he types.
So he dreams lupanar lupanar lupanar
brothels with steam and white dust, music
that describes undiscovered constellations
so precisely the astronomers of the next century
will know where to look. Peaches dripping light.
Lupanar. The female arriving in dreams is unique,
not another like her on earth; she’s created for a moment.
It only happens one time. One time O one time.
He types. She’s his only real food.
O lupanar of dreams.
Head bobbing right and left,
with no effort
and for the first time
I see all sides of the pillar at once,
the earth, her body.
I can’t jump
high anymore.
He tightens
pumps in blue cold air
gasoline
the electricity from summer storms
the seven-by-seven-foot
blue face of lightning
that shot down the gravel road
like a ghost rocket.
Saw the lord of crows
late at night in my living room;
don’t know what true color of man –
black-white-red-yellow –
as he was hooded with the mask of a crow;
arms, legs, with primary feathers sewn to leather
downy black breast
silver bells at wrist
long feathered tail
dancing for a moment or two then disappearing.
Only in the morning did it occur to me
that it was a woman.
What sways us is not each other
but our dumb insistent pulse beating
I was I am I will I was
sometimes operatic, then in church
or barroom tenor, drunkenly, in prayer,
slowly in the confusion of dreams
but the same tripartite, the three
of being here trailing off into itself,
no finale any more than a beginning
until all of us lie buried
in the stupefying ache of caskets.
This earth of intentions.
Moonfucked, you can’t eat or drink
or sleep at ten feet. Kneeling, love
is at nose tip. Or wound about
each other our eyes forget that they are eyes
and begin to see. You remember individual
fence posts, fish, trees, ankles,
from your tenth year.
Those savages lacking other immediate alternatives
screwed the ground to exhaustion.
Bad art: walking away untouched, unmoving,
barely tickled, amused, diverted killing time,
throwing salt on the grass. The grace of Yukio Mishima’s
suicide intervening in the false harmony,
Kawabata decides to live longer, also a harmony.
In bad music, the cheapest and easiest way to get
out of it infers Clapton. Eros girdled in metal
and ozone. A man in a vacuum of images, stirring
his skull with his dick, sparing himself his future,
fancy bound, unparticular, unpeculiar, following
the strings of his dreaming to more dreaming
in a sump narcosis, never having given himself
over to his life, never owning an instant.
Week’s eating log:
whitefish poached with lemon, onion, wine, garlic;
Chulapa – pork roasted twelve hours with pinto beans,
red peppers, chili powder; grilled twenty-two pounds
of beef ribs for friends; a lamb leg pasted with Dijon
mustard, soy, garlic; Chinese pork ribs; menudo
just for Benny & me as no one else would eat it –
had to cook tripe five hours then mix with hominy
and peppers with chorizo tacos on the side;
copious fresh vegetables, Burgundy, Columbard, booze
with all of the above; at night fevered dreams
of her sumptuous butt, a Mercator projection,
the map of an enormous meal in my brain.
Still trying to lose weight.
How strange to see a horse
stare
straight up.
Everything is a good idea at the time.
Staring with stupid longing at a picture, dumbstruck
as they used to call it, an instant’s whimsy;
a body needlessly unlike any other’s,
deserved by someone so monstrous
as Lucrezia Borgia: how do you come to terms
with it? thinks the American. You don’t, terms
being a financial word not applicable
to bodies. Wisdom shies away, the packhorse
startled at the diamondback beneath the mesquite,
the beauty of threat. Now look at her as surely
as that other beast, the dead crow beneath the apple
tree so beautiful in its black glossiness
but without eyes, feet stiff and cool as the air.
I watched it for a year and owned its bleached
shinbone but gave it to someone who needed
the shinbone of a crow.
She says it’s too hot,
the night’s too short,
that I’m too drunk,
but it’s not too anything, ever.
Living all my life with a totally normal-sized dick
(cf. the authorities: Van de Velde, Masters & Johnson)
neither hedgehog or horse, neither emu or elephant
(saw one in Kenya, the girls said O my goodness)
neither wharf rat, arrogant buck dinosaur,
prepoten
t swan, ground squirrel, Lauxmont Admiral
famous Holstein bull who sired 200,000 artificially.
I am saved from trying to punish anyone,
from confusing it with a gun, harpoon, cannon, sword,
cudgel, Louisville Slugger. It just sits there
in the dark, shy and friendly
like the new kid at school.
In our poetry we want to rub our nose hard
into whatever is before it; to purge
these dreams of pictures, photos, phantom people.
She offers a flex of butt, belly button, breasts,
slight puff of veneris, gap in teeth often capped,
grace of knees, high cheekbones and neck,
all the thickness of paper. The grandest illusion
as in ten thousand movies in all those hours
of dark, the only true sound the exploding
popcorn and the dairy fetor of butter. After the movie
a stack of magazines at the drugstore
to filter through, to be filtered through.
A choral piece for a dead dog:
how real the orchestra and hundred
voices on my lawn; pagan with the dog
on a high cedar platform to give the fire
its full marriage of air; the chorus
sings DOG a thousand times, dancing
in a circle. That would be a proper
dog funeral. By god. No dreams here
but a mighty shouting of dog.
Sunday night,
I’m lucky to have all of this vodka,
a gift of Stolichnaya.
And books. And a radio
playing WSM all the way from Nashville.
Four new pups in the bedroom.
The house snores. My tooth aches.
It is time to fry an egg.
Heard the foghorn out at sea,
saw horses’ backs shiny with rain,
felt my belly jiggle as I walked
through the barnyard in a light rain
with my daughter’s small red umbrella