The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

by Jim Harrison

  It’s unfortunate for our theory that the same

  proportion of rich folks are as pleasant

  as poor folks, a pitiless seven

  percent, though not necessarily the ones

  who still say their prayers and finish

  the morning oatmeal to help the poor.

  Everyone I have ever met is deeply

  puzzled.

  II

  Up in Michigan poor folks dream of trips

  to Hawaii or “Vegas.” They muttered deeply

  when the banker won the big lottery –

  “It just don’t seem fair,” they said.

  Long ago when I was poor

  there was something in me that craved

  to get fired, to drink a shot and beer

  with a lump in my throat, hitchhike

  or drive to California in an old car,

  tell my family “I’ll write if I get work.”

  In California, where you can sleep outside

  every night, I saw the Pacific Ocean

  and ate my first food of the Orient,

  a fifty-cent bowl of noodles and pork.

  No more cornmeal mush with salt pork

  gravy, no more shovels at dawn,

  no more clothes smelling of kerosene,

  no more girls wearing ankle bracelets spelling

  another’s name. No more three-hour waits

  in unemployment lines, or cafeteria catsup

  and bread for fifteen cents. I’ve eaten

  my last White Tower burger and I’m heading

  for the top. Or not. How could I dream

  I’d end up moist-eyed in the Beverly Hills Hotel

  when I ordered thirteen appetizers for myself

  and the wheels of the laden trolley squeaked?

  The television in the limousine broke down

  and I missed the news on the way to look

  at the ocean where there were no waves.

  When I went bankrupt I began to notice cemeteries

  and wore out my clothes, drank up the wine cellar.

  I went to the movies and kissed my wife a lot

  for the same reason – they’re both in technicolor.

  Everyone I met in those days was deeply puzzled.

  III

  Now I’ve rubbed rich and poor together

  like two grating stones, mixed them temporarily

  like oil and vinegar, male and female, until

  my interest has waned to nothing. One night I saw

  a constellation that chose not to reappear,

  drifting in the day into another galaxy.

  I tried to ignore the sound of my footsteps

  in the woods until I did, and when I swam

  in the river I finally forgot it was water,

  but I still can’t see a cow without saying cow.

  Perhaps this was not meant to be. I dug

  a deep hole out in a clearing in the forest

  and sat down in it, studying the map

  of the sky above me for clues, a new bible.

  This is rushing things a bit, I thought.

  I became a woman then became a man again.

  I hiked during the night alone and gave

  my dogs fresh bones until they no longer cared.

  I bought drinks for the poor and for myself,

  left mail unopened, didn’t speak on the phone,

  only listened. I shot the copy machine with my rifle.

  No more copies, I thought, everything original!

  Now I am trying to unlearn the universe

  in the usual increments of nights and days.

  Time herself often visits in swirling but gentle clouds.

  Way out there on the borders of my consciousness

  I’ve caught glimpses of that great dark bird,

  the beating of whose wings is death, drawing closer.

  How could it be otherwise? I thought.

  Down in the hole last August during a thunderstorm

  I watched her left wing-tip shudder past

  between two lightning strokes. Maybe I’ll see her again

  during the northern lights, but then, at that moment,

  I was still a child of water and mud.

  DANCING

  After the passing of irresistible

  music you must learn to make

  do with a dripping faucet,

  rain or sleet on the roof,

  eventually snow,

  a cat’s sigh,

  the spherical notes that float

  down from Aldebaran,

  your cells as they part,

  craving oxygen.

  THE IDEA OF BALANCE IS TO BE FOUND IN HERONS AND LOONS

  I just heard a loon-call on a TV ad

  and my body gave itself

  a quite voluntary shudder,

  as in the night in East Africa

  I heard the immense barking cough

  of a lion, so foreign and indifferent.

  But the lion drifts away

  and the loon stays close,

  calling, as she did in my childhood,

  in the cold rain a song

  that tells the world of men

  to keep its distance.

  It isn’t the signal of another life

  or the reminder of anything

  except her call: still,

  at this quiet point past midnight

  the rain is the same rain

  that fell so long ago, and the loon

  says I’m seven years old again.

  At the far ends of the lake

  where no one lives or visits –

  there are no roads to get there;

  you take the watercourse way,

  the quiet drip and drizzle

  of oars, slight squeak of oarlock,

  the bare feet can feel the cold water

  move beneath the old wood boat.

  At one end the lordly great blue herons

  nest at the top of the white pine;

  at the other end the loons,

  just after daylight in cream-colored mist,

  drifting with wails that begin as querulous,

  rising then into the spheres in volume,

  with lost or doomed angels imprisoned

  within their breasts.

  SMALL POEM

  There’s something I’ve never known

  when I get up in the morning.

  Dead children fly off in the shape

  of question marks, the doe’s backward

  glance at the stillborn fawn.

  I don’t know what it is

  in the morning, as if incomprehension

  beds down with me on waking.

  What is the precise emotional temperature

  when the young man hangs himself

  in the jail cell with his father’s belt?

  What is the foot size of the Beast of Belsen?

  This man in his overremembered life

  needs to know the source of the ache

  which is an answer without a question,

  his fingers wrapped around the memory

  of life, as Cleopatra’s around the snake’s neck,

  a shepherd’s crook of love.

  COUNTING BIRDS

  for Gerald Vizenor

  As a child, fresh out of the hospital

  with tape covering the left side

  of my face, I began to count birds.

  At age fifty the sum total is precise

  and astonishing, my only secret.

  Some men count women or the cars

  they’ve owned, their shirts –

  long sleeved and short sleeved –

  or shoes, but I have my birds,

  excluding, of course, those extraordinary

  days: the twenty-one thousand

  snow geese and sandhill cranes at

  Bosque del Apache; the sky blinded

  by great frigate birds in the Pacific

  off Anconcito, Ecuador; the twenty-o
ne

  thousand pink flamingos in Ngorongoro Crater

  in Tanzania; the vast flock of seabirds

  on the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez

  down in Sonora that left at nightfall,

  then reappeared, resuming

  their exact positions at dawn;

  the one thousand cliff swallows nesting

  in the sand cliffs of Pyramid Point,

  their small round burrows like eyes,

  really the souls of the Anasazi who flew

  here a thousand years ago

  to wait the coming of the Manitou.

  And then there were the usual, almost deadly

  birds of the soul – the crow with silver

  harness I rode one night as if she

  were a black, feathered angel;

  the birds I became to escape unfortunate

  circumstances – how the skin ached

  as the feathers shot out toward light;

  the thousand birds the dogs helped

  me shoot to become a bird (grouse, woodcock,

  duck, dove, snipe, pheasant, prairie chicken, etc.).

  On my deathbed I’ll write this secret

  number on a slip of paper and pass

  it to my wife and two daughters.

  It will be a hot evening in late June

  and they might be glancing out the window

  at the thunderstorm’s approach from the west.

  Looking past their eyes and a dead fly

  on the window screen I’ll wonder

  if there’s a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.

  O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried

  me along on this bloody voyage,

  carry me now into that cloud,

  into the marvel of this final night.

  AFTER IKKYŪ & OTHER POEMS

  for Jack Turner

  1996

  PREFACE

  I began my Zen studies and practice well over twenty years ago in a state of rapacious and self-congratulatory spiritual greed. I immediately set about reading hundreds of books on the subject, almost all contemporary and informed by an earnest mediocrity. There was no more self-referential organism alive than myself, a potato that didn’t know it was a potato.

  Naturally the years have passed quickly, if not brutishly. I practiced because I value life and this seems the best way for me to get at the heart of the matter. We are more than dying flies in a shithouse, though we are that, too. There are hundreds of ways to tip off a cushion and only one way to sit there. Zen is the vehicle of reality, and I see almost as much of it in Wordsworth as I do in Ch’an texts. As I’ve said before, it’s easy to mistake the plumbing for the river. We in the West are prone to ignore our own literary traditions, while in the East Zennists were industriously syncretic, gathering poetry, Confucius, and Taoism to their breasts. There is scarcely a better koan than Ahab before the whiteness of a whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head.

  The sequence “After Ikkyū” was occasioned when Jack Turner passed along to me The Record of Tung-shan and the new Master Yunmen, edited by Urs App. It was a dark period, and I spent a great deal of time with the books. They rattled me loose from the oppressive, poleaxed state of distraction we count as worldly success. But then we are not fueled by piths and gists but by practice – which is Yunmen’s unshakable point, amongst a thousand other harrowing ones. I was born a baby, what are these hundred suits of clothes I’m wearing?

  Of course, the reader should be mindful that I’m a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less. I do not remotely consider myself a “Zen Buddhist,” as that is too ineptly convenient, and a specific barrier for one whose lifelong obsession has been his art rather than his religion. Someone like Robert Aitken Roshi is a Zen Buddhist. I’m still a fool. Early on in my teens I suffocated myself with Protestant theology and am mindful, in Coleridge’s terms, that, like spiders, we spin webs of deceit out of our big hanging asses, whether with Jesus or the Buddha.

  But still practice is accretive, and who has opened doors for me like Zen creatures – Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Kobun Chino Sensei, Bob Watkins, Dan Gerber, and Jack Turner, to name a few prominent ones?

  It doesn’t really matter if these poems are thought of as slightly soiled dharma gates or just plain poems. They’ll live or die by their own specific density, flowers for the void. The poems were written within the discreet interval described so poignantly by Tung-shan:

  Earnestly avoid seeking without,

  Lest it recede far from you.

  Today I am walking alone,

  Yet everywhere I meet him.

  He is now no other than myself,

  But I am not now him.

  It must be understood this way

  In order to merge with Suchness.

  To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime.

  –J.H.

  1996

  AFTER IKKYŪ

  1

  Our minds buzz like bees

  but not the bees’ minds.

  It’s just wings not heart

  they say, moving to another flower.

  2

  The well pit is beneath where the pump shed burned

  years ago with a living roar, a fire lion. Down

  in the pit, charred timbers, green grass, one burdock,

  a vernal pool where frogs live trapped in a universe.

  3

  I’ve wasted too much moonlight.

  Breast-beating. I’ll waste no more moonlight,

  the moon bullied by clouds drifts west

  in her imponderable arc, snared for a half

  hour among the wet leaves in the birdbath.

  4

  After thirty years of work

  I take three months off

  and wait for the mirror’s image to fade.

  These chess pieces, slippery with blood.

  5

  Time eats us alive.

  On my birthday yesterday

  I was only one day older

  though I began ten million eons ago

  as a single cell in the old mud homestead.

  6

  Shoju sat all night in the graveyard

  among wolves who sniffed his Adam’s apple.

  First light moving in the air

  he arose, peed, and ate breakfast.

  7

  With each shot

  he killed the self

  until there was no one left

  to bring home the bacon.

  8

  One part of the brain attacks another,

  seven parts attack nine parts,

  then the war begins to subside

  from lack of ammunition,

  but out there I know the mules are bringing

  fresh supplies from over the mountain.

  9

  Poor little blind boy lost in the storm,

  where should he go to be without harm?

  For starters, the dickhead should get a life.

  Once I had a moment of absolute balance

  while dancing with my sick infant daughter

  to Merle Haggard. The blind boy died in the storm

  with fresh frozen laughter hot on his lips.

  10

  Our pup is gravely ill.

  She’s her own pup too,

  first in her own line.

  How great thou art o god,

  save her, please, the same cry

  in every throat. May I live forever.

  11

  At Hard Luck Ranch the tea is hot,

  the sky’s dark blue. Behind me

  the jaguar skin from the jaguar

  who died so long ago from a bullet

  while perched on a calf’s back

  tells me the same old story.

  12

  Not here and now but now and here.


  If you don’t know the difference

  is a matter of life and death, get down

  naked on bare knees in the snow

  and study the ticking of your watch.

  13

  The hound I’ve known for three years

  trots down the mountain road

  with a nod at me, pretending he knows

  what he’s doing miles from home

  on a sunlit morning. He’s headed

  for a kind of place he hasn’t quite found yet

  and might not recognize when he gets there.

  14

  At the strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska,

  she said, “I’m the Princess of Shalimar.”

  Doubtless, I thought, at a loss for words

  but not images, the air moist but without

  the promise of a rain. She’s not bending

  pinkly like a pretzel but a body.

  At this age, my first bona fide royalty.

  15

  Way up a sandy draw in the foothills

  of the Whetstone Mountains I found cougar

  tracks so fresh, damp sand was still

  trickling in from the edges. For some reason

  I knelt and sniffed them, quite sure

  I was being watched by a living rock

  in the vast, heat-blurred landscape.

  16

  I went to Tucson and it gave

  me a headache. I don’t know how.

  Everyone’s a cousin in this world.