by Jim Harrison
don’t worry, it’s fine to be dead,
they say; we were a little early
but could not help ourselves.
Everyone dies as the child they were,
and at the moment, this secret,
intricately concealed heart blooms
forth with the first song anyone
sang in the dark, “Now I lay me
down to sleep, I pray the Lord
my soul to keep…”
Now this oddly gentle winter, almost dulcet,
winds to a blurred close with trees full
of birds that belong farther south,
and people are missing something
to complain about; a violent March
is an unacknowledged prayer;
a rape of nature, a healing blizzard,
a very near disaster.
So this last lament:
as unknowable as the eye of the crow
staring down from the walnut tree,
blind as the Magellanic clouds,
as cold as that March mud puddle
at the foot of the granary steps,
unseeable as the birthright of the LA
whore’s Nebraska childhood of lilacs
and cornfields and an unnamed prairie
bird that lived in a thicket
where she hid,
as treacherous as a pond’s spring
ice to a child,
black as the scar of a half-peeled
birch tree,
the wrench of the beast’s heart just
short of the waterhole,
as bell-clear as a gunshot at dawn,
is the ache of a father’s death.
It is that, but far more:
as if we take a voyage out of life
as surely as we took a voyage in,
almost as frightened children
in a cellar’s cold gray air;
or before memory – they put me on a boat
on this river, then I was lifted off;
in our hearts, it is always just after
dawn, and each bird’s song is the first,
and that ever-so-slight breeze that touches
the tops of trees and ripples the lake
moves through our bodies as if we were gods.
HORSE
What if it were our privilege
to sculpt our dreams of animals?
But those shapes in the night
come and go too quickly to be held
in stone: but not to avoid these shapes
as if dreams were only a nighttime
pocket to be remembered and avoided.
Who can say in the depths of
his life and heart what beast
most stopped life, the animals
he watched, the animals he only touched
in dreams? Even our hearts don’t beat
the way we want them to. What
can we know in that waking,
sleeping edge? We put down
my daughter’s old horse, old and
arthritic, a home burial. By dawn with eye
half-open, I said to myself, is
he still running, is he still running
around, under the ground?
COBRA
What are these nightmares,
so wildly colored? We’re in every
movie we see, even in our sleep.
Not that we can become what
we fear most but that we can’t
resist ourselves. The grizzly
attack; after that divorce
and standing outside the school
with a rifle so they can’t take my
daughter Anna. By god! Long ago
in Kenya where I examined the
grass closely before I sat down
to a poisonous lunch, I worried
about cobras. When going insane I worried
about cobra venom in Major Grey’s Chutney.
Simple as that. Then in overnight sleep I became
a lordly cobra, feeling the pasture grass
at high noon glide beneath my
stomach. I watched the house with
my head arched above the weeds,
then slept in the cool dirt under the granary.
PORPOISE
Every year, when we’re fly-fishing for tarpon
off Key West, Guy insists that porpoises
are good luck. But it’s not so banal
as catching more fish or having a fashion
model fall out of the sky lightly on your head,
or at your feet depending on certain
preferences. It’s what porpoises do to the ocean.
You see a school making love off Boca Grande,
the baby with his question mark staring
at us a few feet from the boat.
Porpoises dance for as long as they live.
You can do nothing for them.
They alter the universe.
THE BRAND NEW STATUE OF LIBERTY
to Lee Iacocca (another Michigan boy)
I was commissioned in a dream by Imanja,
also the Black Pope of Brazil, Tancred,
to design a seven-tiered necklace
of seven thousand skulls for the Statue of Liberty.
Of course from a distance they’ll look
like pearls, but in November
when the strongest winds blow, the skulls
will rattle wildly, bone against metal,
a crack and chatter of bone against metal,
the true sound of history, this metal striking bone.
I’m not going to get heavy-handed –
a job is a job and I’ve leased a football
field for the summer, gathered a group of ladies
who are art lovers, leased in advance
a bull Sikorsky freight helicopter
to drop on the necklace: funding comes
from Ford Foundation, Rockefeller, the NEA.
There is one Jewish skull from Atlanta, two
from Mississippi, but this is basically
an indigenous cast except skulls from tribes
of blacks who got a free ride over from Africa,
representative skulls from all the Indian
tribes, an assortment of grizzly, wolf,
coyote and buffalo skulls. But what beauty
when the morning summer sun glances
off these bony pates! And her great
iron lips quivering in a smile, almost a smirk
so that she’ll drop the torch to fondle the jewels.
THE TIMES ATLAS
For my mentor, long dead, Richard Halliburton
and his Seven League Boots.
Today was the coldest day in the history
of the Midwest. Thank god for the moon
in this terrible storm.
There are areas far out at sea where
it rains a great deal. Camus said
it rained so hard even the sea was wet.
O god all our continents are only rifted
magma welled up from below. We don’t
have a solid place to stand.
A little bullshit here as the Nile
is purportedly eighty miles longer
than the Amazon. I proclaim it a tie.
Pay out your 125 bucks and find out the world
isn’t what you think it is but what
it is. We whirl so nothing falls off.
Eels, polar bears, bugs and men enjoy
the maker’s design. No one really
leaves this place. O loveliness
of Caribbean sun off water under
trade wind’s lilt.
Meanwhile the weather is no longer amusing.
Earth frightens me, the blizzard, house’s
shudder, oceanic roar, the brittle night
that might leave so many dead.
NEW LOVE
With these dire portents
we’ll learn the la
nguage
of knees, shoulder blades,
chins but not the first floor up,
shinbones, the incomprehensible
belly buttons of childhood,
heels and the soles of our feet,
spines and neckbones,
risqué photos of the tender
inside of elbows, tumescent fingers
draw the outlines of lost parts
on the wall; bottom and pubis
Delphic, unapproachable as Jupiter,
a memory worn as the first love
we knew, ourselves a test pattern
become obsession: this love
in the plague years – we used to kiss
a mirror to see if we were dead.
Now we relearn the future as we learned
to walk, as a baby grabs its toes,
tilts backward, rocking. Tonight I’ll touch
your wrist and in a year perhaps grind
my blind eye’s socket against your hipbone.
With all this death, behind our backs,
the moon has become the moon again.
WHAT HE SAID WHEN I WAS ELEVEN
August, a dense heat wave at the cabin
mixed with torrents of rain,
the two-tracks become miniature rivers.
In the Russian Orthodox Church
one does not talk to God, one sings.
This empty and sun-blasted land
has a voice rising in shimmers.
I did not sing in Moscow
but St. Basil’s in Leningrad raised
a quiet tune. But now seven worlds
away I hang the cazas-moscas
from the ceiling and catch seven flies
in the first hour, buzzing madly
against the stickiness. I’ve never seen
the scissor-tailed flycatcher, a favorite
bird of my youth, the worn Audubon
card pinned to the wall. When I miss
flies three times with the swatter
they go free for good. Fair is fair.
There is too much nature pressing against
the window as if it were a green night;
and the river swirling in glazed turbulence
is less friendly than ever before.
Forty years ago she called, Come home, come home,
it’s suppertime. I was fishing a fishless
cattle pond with a new three-dollar pole,
dreaming the dark blue ocean of pictures.
In the barn I threw down hay
while my Swede grandpa finished milking,
squirting the barn cat’s mouth with an udder.
I kissed the wet nose of my favorite cow,
drank a dipper of fresh warm milk
and carried two pails to the house,
scraping the manure off my feet
in the pump shed. She poured the milk
in the cream separator and I began cranking.
At supper the oilcloth was decorated
with worn pink roses. We ate cold herring,
also the bluegills we had caught at daylight.
The fly-strip above the table idled in
the window’s breeze, a new fly in its death buzz.
Grandpa said, “We are all flies.”
That’s what he said forty years ago.
ACTING
for J.N.
In the best sense,
becoming another
so that there is no trace left
of what we think is the self.
I am whoever.
It is not gesture
but the cortex of gesture,
not movement
but the soul of movement.
Look at the earth with your left eye
and at the sky with your right.
Worship contraries.
What makes us alike
is also what makes us different.
From Man to Jokester to Trickster
is a nudge toward the deep,
the incalculable abyss
you stare into so it will
stare back into you.
We are our consciousness
and it is the god in us
who struggles to be in everyone
in order to be ourselves.
When you see the chalked form
of the murdered man on the cement
throw yourself onto it and feel
the heat of the stone-hard fit.
This is the liquid poem,
the forefinger traced around both
the neck and the sun:
to be and be and be
as a creek turns corners
by grace of volume, heft of water,
speed by rate of drop,
even the contour of stone
changing day by day.
So that: when you wake in the night,
the freedom of the nightmare
turned to dream follows you
into morning, and there is no
skin on earth you cannot enter,
no beast or plant,
no man or woman
you may not flow through
and become.
MY FRIEND THE BEAR
Down in the bone myth of the cellar
of this farmhouse, behind the empty fruit jars
the whole wall swings open to the room
where I keep the bear. There’s a tunnel
to the outside on the far wall that emerges
in the lilac grove in the backyard
but she rarely uses it, knowing there’s no room
around here for a freewheeling bear.
She’s not a dainty eater so once a day
I shovel shit while she lopes in playful circles.
Privately she likes religion – from the bedroom
I hear her incantatory moans and howls
below me – and April 23rd, when I open
the car trunk and whistle at midnight
and she shoots up the tunnel, almost airborne
when she meets the night. We head north
and her growls are less friendly as she scents
the forest-above-the-road smell. I release
her where I found her as an orphan three
years ago, bawling against the dead carcass
of her mother. I let her go at the head
of the gully leading down to the swamp,
jumping free of her snarls and roars.
But each October 9th, one day before bear season
she reappears at the cabin frightening
the bird dogs. We embrace ear to ear,
her huge head on my shoulder,
her breathing like god’s.
CABIN POEM
I
The blond girl
with a polka heart:
one foot, then another,
then aerial
in a twisting jump,
chin upward
with a scream of such
splendor
I go back to my cabin,
and start a fire.
II
Art & life
drunk & sober
empty & full
guilt & grace
cabin & home
north & south
struggle & peace
after which we catch
a glimpse of stars,
the white glistening pelt
of the Milky Way,
hear the startled bear crashing
through the delta swamp below me.
In these troubled times
I go inside and start a fire.
III
I am the bird that hears the worm,
or, my cousin said, the pulse of a wound
that probes to the opposite side.
I have abandoned alcohol, cocaine,
the news, and outdoor prayer
as support systems.
How can you make a case for yourself
before an ocean of trees, or stan
ding
waist-deep in the river? Or sitting
on the logjam with a pistol?
I reject oneness with bears.
She has two cubs and thinks she
owns the swamp I thought I bought.
I shoot once in the air to tell her
it’s my turn at the logjam
for an hour’s thought about nothing.
Perhaps that is oneness with bears.
I’ve decided to make up my mind
about nothing, to assume the water mask,
to finish my life disguised as a creek,
an eddy, joining at night the full,
sweet flow, to absorb the sky,
to swallow the heat and cold, the moon
and the stars, to swallow myself
in ceaseless flow.
RICH FOLKS, POOR FOLKS, AND NEITHER
I
Rich folks keep their teeth
until late in life,
and park their cars in heated garages.
They own kitsch statues of praying hands
that conceal seven pounds of solid gold,
knowing that burglars hedge at icons.
At the merest twinge they go to the dentist,
and their dogs’ anuses are professionally
inspected for unsuspected diseases.
Rich folks dream of the perfect massage
that will bring secret, effortless orgasm,
and absolutely super and undiscovered
islands with first-rate hotels
where they will learn to windsurf
in five minutes. They buy clothes that fit –
a forty waist means forty pants – rich folks
don’t squeeze into thirty-eights. At spas
they are not too critical of their big asses,
and they believe in real small portions
because they can eat again pretty quick.
Rich folks resent richer folks
and they also resent poor folks
for their failures at meniality.