The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

by Jim Harrison

  to Corsica, to return to Costa Rica,

  but I couldn’t escape the suicidal house

  until May when I drove

  through the snow to reach the river.

  On the bank by the spring creek

  my shadow seemed to leap

  up to gather me, or it leapt

  up to gather me, not seeming so

  but as a natural fact. Faulkner said

  that the drowned man’s shadow had watched

  him from the river all the time.

  Drowning in the bourgeois trough,

  a bourride or gruel of money, drugs,

  whiskey, hotels, the dream coasts,

  ass in the air at the trough, drowning

  in a river of pus, pus of civilization,

  pus of cities, unholy river of shit,

  of filth, shit of nightmares, shit

  of skewed dreams and swallowed years.

  The river pulls me out,

  draws me elsewhere

  and down to blue water,

  green water,

  black water.

  How far between the Virgin

  and the Garrison and back?

  Why is it a hundred times farther to get back,

  the return upriver in the dark?

  It isn’t innocence, but to win back breath,

  body heat, the light that gathers around

  a waking animal. Ten years ago I saw

  the dancing Virgin in a basement

  in New York, a whirl of hot color

  from floor to ceiling, whirling in a dance.

  At eighteen in New York

  on Grove Street I discovered

  red wine, garlic, Rimbaud,

  and a red-haired girl. Livid colors

  not known in farm country,

  also Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins,

  the odors from restaurant vents,

  thirty-five-cent Italian sausages

  on Macdougal, and the Hudson River:

  days of river-watching and trying

  to get on a boat for the tropics and see

  that Great Ocean river, the Gulf Stream.

  Another fifteen years before I saw

  the Ocean river and the sharks hanging

  under the sargassum weed lines,

  a blue river in green water,

  and the sharks staring back, sinking

  down listlessly into darker water;

  the torpor of heat, a hundred low-tide

  nights begging a forgetfulness

  I haven’t quite earned.

  I forgot where I heard that poems

  are designed to waken sleeping gods;

  in our time they’ve taken on nearly

  unrecognizable shapes as gods will do;

  one is a dog, one is a scarecrow

  that doesn’t work – crows perch

  on the wind-whipped sleeves,

  one is a carpenter who doesn’t become Jesus,

  one is a girl who went to heaven

  sixty years early. Gods die,

  and not always out of choice,

  like near-sighted cats jumping

  between buildings seven stories up.

  One god drew feathers out of my skin

  so I could fly, a favor close to terror.

  But this isn’t a map of the gods.

  When they live in rivers

  it’s because rivers have no equilibrium;

  gods resent equilibrium when everything

  that lives moves; boulders

  are a war of atoms, and the dandelion

  cracks upward through the blacktop road.

  Seltzer’s tropical beetle grew

  from a larval lump in a man’s arm,

  emerging full grown, pincers waving.

  On Mt. Cuchama there were so many

  gods passing through I hid in a hole

  in a rock, waking one by accident.

  I fled with a tight ass and cold skin.

  I could draw a map of this place

  but they’re never caught in the same location

  twice. And their voices change from involuntary

  screams to the singular wail of the loon,

  possibly the wind that can howl down Wall St.

  Gods have long abandoned the banality of war

  though they were stirred by a hundred-year-old

  guitarist I heard in Brazil, also the autistic child

  at the piano. We’ll be greeted at death

  so why should I wait? Today I invoked

  any available god back in the woods in the fog.

  The world was white with last week’s melting

  blizzard, the fog drifting upward, then descending.

  The only sound was a porcupine eating bark

  off an old tree, and a rivulet beneath the snow.

  Sometimes the obvious is true: the full

  moon on her bare bottom by the river!

  For the gay, the full moon on the lover’s prick!

  Gods laugh at the fiction of gender.

  Water-gods, moon-gods, god-fever,

  sun-gods, fire-gods, give this earth-diver

  more songs before I die.

  A “system” suggests the cutting off,

  i.e., in channel morphology, the reduction,

  the suppression of texture to simplify:

  to understand a man, or woman, growing

  old with eagerness you first consider

  the sensuality of death, an unacknowledged

  surprise to most. In nature the physiology

  has heat and color, beast and tree

  saying aloud the wonder of death;

  to study rivers, including the postcard

  waterfalls, is to adopt another life;

  a limited life attaches itself to the endless

  movement, the renowned underground

  rivers of South America which I’ve felt

  thundering far beneath my feet – to die

  is to descend into such rivers and flow

  along in the perfect dark. But above ground

  I’m memorizing life, from the winter moon

  to the sound of my exhaustion in March

  when all the sodden plans have collapsed

  and only daughters, the dogs and cats

  keep one from disappearing at gunpoint.

  I brought myself here and stare nose to nose

  at the tolerant cat who laps whiskey

  from my mustache. Life often shatters

  in schizoid splinters. I will avoid

  becoming the cold stone wall I am straddling.

  I had forgot what it was I liked

  about life. I hear if you own a chimpanzee

  they cease at a point to be funny. Writers

  and politicians share an embarrassed moment

  when they are sure all problems will disappear

  if you get the language right.

  That’s not all they share – in each other’s

  company they are like boys who have been

  discovered at wiener-play in the toilet.

  At worst, it’s the gift of gab.

  At best it’s Martin Luther King and Rimbaud.

  Bearing down hard on love and death

  there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  All these years they have split the pie,

  leaving the topping for the preachers

  who don’t want folks to fuck or eat.

  What kind of magic, or rite of fertility,

  to transcend this shit-soaked stew?

  The river is as far as I can move

  from the world of numbers: I’m all

  for full retreats, escapes, a 47 yr. old runaway.

  “Gettin’ too old to run away,” I wrote

  but not quite believing this option is gray.

  I stare into the deepest pool of the river

  which holds the mystery of a cellar to a child,

  and think of those two-track roads that dwindle
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  into nothing in the forest. I have this feeling

  of walking around for days with the wind

  knocked out of me. In the cellar was a root

  cellar where we stored potatoes, apples, carrots

  and where a family of harmless blacksnakes lived.

  In certain rivers there are pools a hundred

  foot deep. In a swamp I must keep secret

  there is a deep boiling spring around which

  in the dog days of August large brook trout

  swim and feed. An adult can speak dreams

  to children saying that there is a spring

  that goes down to the center of the earth.

  Maybe there is. Next summer I’m designing

  and building a small river about seventy-seven

  foot long. It will flow both ways, in reverse

  of nature. I will build a dam and blow it up.

  The involuntary image that sweeps

  into the mind, irresistible and without evident

  cause as a dream or thunderstorm,

  or rising to the surface from childhood,

  the longest journey taken in a split second,

  from there to now, without pause:

  in the woods with Mary Cooper, my first love

  wearing a violet scarf in May. We’re

  looking after her huge mongoloid aunt,

  trailing after this woman who loves us

  but so dimly perceives the world. We pick

  and clean wild leeks for her. The creek

  is wild and dangerous with the last

  of the snowmelt. The child-woman

  tries to enter the creek and we tackle her.

  She’s stronger, then slowly understands,

  half-wet and muddy. She kisses me

  while Mary laughs, then Mary kisses me

  over and over. Now I see the pools

  in the Mongol eyes that watch and smile

  with delight and hear the roar of the creek,

  smell the scent of leeks on her muddy lips.

  This is an obscene koan set plumb

  in the middle of the Occident:

  the man with three hands lacks symmetry

  but claps the loudest, the chicken

  in circles on the sideless road, a plane

  that takes off and can never land.

  I am not quite alert enough to live.

  The fallen nest and fire in the closet,

  my world without guardrails, the electric

  noose, the puddle that had no bottom.

  The fish in underground rivers are white

  and blind as the porpoises who live far up

  the muddy Amazon. In New York and LA

  you don’t want to see, hear, smell,

  and you only open your mouth in restaurants.

  At night you touch people with rock-hard skins.

  I’m trying to become alert enough to live.

  Yesterday after the blizzard I hiked far back

  in a new swamp and found an iceless

  pond connected to the river by a small creek.

  Against deep white snow and black trees

  there was a sulfurous fumarole, rank and sharp

  in cold air. The water bubbled up brown,

  then spread in turquoise to deep black,

  without the track of a single mammal to drink.

  This was nature’s own, a beauty too strong

  for life; a place to drown not live.

  On waking after the accident

  I was presented with the “whole picture”

  as they say, magnificently detailed,

  a child’s diorama of what life appears to be:

  staring at the picture I became drowsy

  with relief when I noticed a yellow

  dot of light in the lower right-hand corner.

  I unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled

  to the picture, with an eyeball to the dot

  of light, which turned out to be a miniature

  tunnel at the end of which I could see

  mountains and stars whirling and tumbling,

  sheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside-

  down lakes, herds of unknown mammals, birds

  shedding feathers and regrowing them instantly,

  snakes with feathered heads eating their own

  shed skins, fish swimming straight up,

  the bottom of Isaiah’s robe, live whales

  on dry ground, lions drinking from a golden

  bowl of milk, the rush of night,

  and somewhere in this the murmur of gods –

  a tree-rubbing-tree music, a sweet howl

  of water and rock-grating-rock, fire

  hissing from fissures, the moon settled

  comfortably on the ground, beginning to roll.

  KOBUN

  Hotei didn’t need a zafu,

  saying that his ass was sufficient.

  The head’s a cloud anchor

  that the feet must follow.

  Travel light, he said,

  or don’t travel at all.

  LOOKING FORWARD TO AGE

  I will walk down to a marina

  on a hot day and not go out to sea.

  I will go to bed and get up early,

  and carry too much cash in my wallet.

  On Memorial Day I will visit the graves

  of all those who died in my novels.

  If I have become famous I’ll wear a green

  janitor’s suit and row a wooden boat.

  From a key ring on my belt will hang

  thirty-three keys that open no doors.

  Perhaps I’ll take all of my grandchildren

  to Disneyland in a camper but probably not.

  One day standing in a river with my fly rod

  I’ll have the courage to admit my life.

  In a one-room cabin at night I’ll consign

  photos, all tentative memories to the fire.

  And you my loves, few as there have been, let’s lie

  and say it could never have been otherwise.

  So that: we may glide off in peace, not howling

  like orphans in this endless century of war.

  HOMILY

  These simple rules to live within – a black

  pen at night, a gold pen in daylight,

  avoid blue food and ten-ounce shots

  of whiskey, don’t point a gun at yourself,

  don’t snipe with the cri-cri-cri of a becassine,

  don’t use gas for starter fluid, don’t read

  dirty magazines in front of stewardesses –

  it happens all the time; it’s time to stop

  cleaning your plate, forget the birthdays

  of the dead, give all you can to the poor.

  This might go on and on and will: who can

  choose between the animal in the road

  and the ditch? A magnum for lunch

  is a little too much but not enough

  for dinner. Polish the actual stars at night

  as an invisible man pets a dog, an actual

  man a memory-dog lost under

  the morning glory trellis forty years ago.

  Dance with yourself with all your heart

  and soul, and occasionally others, but don’t

  eat all the berries birds eat or you’ll die.

  Kiss yourself in the mirror but don’t fall in love

  with photos of ladies in magazines. Don’t fall

  in love as if you were falling through

  the floor in an abandoned house, or off

  a dock at night, or down a crevasse

  covered with false snow, a cow floundering

  in quicksand while the other cows watch

  without particular interest, backward

  off a crumbling cornice. Don’t fall in love

  with two at once. From the ceiling you can see

  this circle of three, though one might be elsewhere.

&
nbsp; He is rended, he rends himself, he dances,

  he whirls so hard everything he is flies off.

  He crumples as paper but rises daily from the dead.

  SOUTHERN CROSS

  That hot desert beach in Ecuador,

  with scarcely a splotch of vegetation

  fronting as it does

  a Pacific so immensely lush

  it hurls lobsters on great flat

  boulders where children brave fatal

  waves to pick them up.

  Turning from one to the other quickly,

  it is incomprehensible: from wild, gray

  sunblasted burro eating cactus to azure

  immensity of ocean, from miniature

  goat dead on infantile feet in sand

  to imponderable roar of swells, equatorial sun;

  music that squeezes the blood out of the heart

  by midnight, and girls whose legs

  glisten with sweat, their teeth white

  as Canadian snow, legs pounding as plump

  brown pistons, and night noises I’ve

  never heard, though at the coolest period

  in these latitudes, near the faintest

  beginning of dawn, there was the cold

  unmistakable machine gun, the harshest

  chatter death can make. Only then do

  I think of my very distant relative, Lorca,

  that precocious skeleton, as he crumpled

  earthward against brown pine needles;

  and the sky, vaster than the Pacific,

  whirled overhead, a sky without birds or clouds,

  azul te quiero azul.

  SULLIVAN POEM

  March 5: first day without a fire.

  Too early. Too early. Too early!

  Take joy in the day

  without consideration, the three

  newly-brought-to-life bugs

  who are not meant to know

  what they are doing avoid each other

  on windows stained

  by a dozen storms.

  We eat our father’s food:

  herring, beans, salt pork,

  sauerkraut, pig hocks, salt cod.

  I have said good-bye with one thousand

  laments so that even the heart of the rose

  becomes empty as my dog’s rubber ball.

  The dead are not meant to go,

  but to trail off so that one can

  see them on a distant hillock,

  across the river, in dreams

  from which one awakens nearly healed: