by Jim Harrison
that have surrounded me for three years. I kept on saying
look at me, I’m not wise. I’ve advised seven suicides.
No one’s separate. Our legs grow into the horse’s body.
You’ve ridden each other too long to get off now.
You can make a clean getaway only if you cut off your heads.
All in vain. Life won’t get simple until our minds do.
Embrace the great emptiness; say again, I don’t do divorces.
57
Took my own life because I was permanently crippled,
put on backward, the repairs eating up money and time.
For fifty-seven years I’ve had it all wrong
until I studied the other side of the mirror.
No birth before death. The other way around.
How pleasant to get off a horse in the middle of the lake.
THE DAVENPORT LUNAR ECLIPSE
Overlooking the Mississippi
I never thought I’d get this old.
It was mostly my confusion about time
and the moon, and seeing the lovely way
homely old men treat their homely old women
in Nebraska and Iowa, the lunch time
touch over green Jell-O with pineapple
and fried “fish rectangles” for $2.95.
When I passed Des Moines the radio said
there were long lines to see the entire cow
sculpted out of butter. The earth is right smack
between the sun and the moon, the black waitress
told me at the Salty Pelican on the waterfront,
home from wild Houston to nurse her sick dad.
My good eye is burning up from fatigue
as it squints up above the Mississippi
where the moon is losing its edge to black.
It likely doesn’t know what’s happening to it,
I thought, pressed down to my meal and wine
by a fresh load of incomprehension.
My grandma lived in Davenport in the 1890s
just after Wounded Knee, a signal event,
the beginning of America’s Sickness unto Death.
I’d like to nurse my father back to health
he’s been dead thirty years, I said
to the waitress who agreed. That’s why she
came home, she said, you only got one.
Now I find myself at fifty-one in Davenport
and drop the issue right into the Mississippi
where it is free to swim with the moon’s reflection.
At the bar there are two girls of incomprehensible beauty
for the time being, as Swedish as my Grandma,
speaking in bad grammar as they listen to a band
of middle-aged Swede saxophonists braying
“Bye-Bye Blackbird” over and over, with a clumsy
but specific charm. The girls fail to notice me –
perhaps I should give them the thousand dollars
in my wallet but I’ve forgotten just how.
I feel pleasantly old and stupid, deciding
not to worry about who I am but how I spend
my days, until I tear in the weak places
like a thin, worn sheet. Back in my room
I can’t hear the river passing like time,
or the moon emerging from the shadow of earth,
but I can see the water that never repeats itself.
It’s very difficult to look at the World
and into your heart at the same time.
In between, a life has passed.
COYOTE NO. 1
Just before dark
watched coyote take a crap
on rock outcropping,
flexing hips (no time off)
swiveled owl-like to see
in all six directions:
sky above
earth below,
points of compass
in two half-circles.
There.
And there is no distance.
He knows the dreamer
that dreams his dreams.
TIME SUITE
Just seven weeks ago in Paris
I read Chuang Tzu in my dreams
and remembered once again
we are only here for a moment,
not very wild mushrooms,
just cartoon creatures that are blown apart
and only think they are put back together,
housepets within a house fire of impermanence.
In this cold cellar we see light
without knowing it is out of reach;
not to be owned but earned
moment by moment.
But still at dawn
in the middle of Paris’s heart
there was a crow I spoke to
on the cornice far above my window.
It is the crow from home
that cawed above the immense
gaunt bear eating sweet-pea vines
and wild strawberries.
Today in the garden of Luxembourg
I passed through clumps of frozen vines
and saw a man in a bulletproof
glass house guarding stone,
a girl in the pink suit
of an unknown animal,
lovers nursing at each other’s mouths.
I know that at my deathbed’s urging
there’ll be no clocks and I’ll cry out
for heat not light.
This lady is stuck
on an elevator
shuddering
between the planets.
If life has passed this quickly,
a millennium is not all that long.
At fourteen
my sex fantasies
about Lucrezia Borgia:
I loved her name, the image
of her rinascimento undies,
her feet in the stirrups
of a golden saddle.
She’s gone now
these many years.
Dad told me that we have time
so that everything won’t happen at once.
For instance, deaths are spread out.
It would be real hard on people
if all the deaths for the year
occurred the same day.
Lemuribus vertebrates,
ossibus inter-tenebras –
“For the vertebrate ghosts,
for the bones among the darknesses,”
quoted the great Bringhurst,
who could have conquered Manhattan
and returned it to the natives,
who might have continued dancing
on the rocky sward.
The stillness
of dog shadows.
Here is time:
In the crotch of limbs
the cow’s skull grew
into the tree
and birds nested in the mouth
year after year.
Human blood still fertilizes
the crops of Yurp.
The humus owns names:
Fred and Ted from old Missouri,
Cedric and Basil from Cornwall,
Heinz and Hans from Stuttgart,
Fyodor and Gretel in final embrace
beside raped Sylvie,
clod to clod.
The actual speed of life
is so much slower
we could have lived
exactly seven times as long
as we did.
These calendars
with pussy photos
send us a mixed message:
Marilyn Monroe stretched out
in unwingéd victory,
pink against red and reaching
not for the president or Nembutal
but because, like cats,
we like to do so.
Someday
like rockets without shells
we’ll head for the stars.
On my newly devised calendar
there are
only three days a month.
All the rest is space
so that night and day
don’t feel uncomfortable
within my confines.
I’m not pushing them around,
making them do this and that.
Just this once
cows are shuffling over the hard rock
of the creek bed.
Two ravens in the black oak
purling whistles, coos, croaks,
raven-talk for the dead wild cow’s
hindquarter in the grass,
the reddest of reds,
hips crushed when lassoed.
The cow dogs, blue heelers,
first in line for the meat,
all tugging like Africa.
Later, a stray sister
sniffs the femur bone,
bawls in boredom or lament.
In this sun’s clock the bone
will become white, whiter, whitest.
The soul’s decorum
dissembles
when she understands
that ashes have never
returned to wood.
Even running downstream
I couldn’t step
into the same river once
let alone twice.
At first the sound
of the cat drinking water
was unendurable,
then it was broken by a fly
heading north,
a curve-billed thrasher
swallowing a red berry,
a dead sycamore leaf
suspended on its way to earth
by a breeze so slight
it went otherwise unnoticed.
The girl in the many-windowed bedroom
with full light coming in from the south
and the sun broken by trees,
has never died.
My friend’s great-grandfather
lived from 1798 until 1901.
When a place is finished
you realize it went
like a truly beloved dog
whose vibrance had made
you think it would last forever;
becoming slightly sick,
then well and new again
though older, then sick
again, a long sickness.
A home burial.
They don’t appear to have
firmed up their idea when time
started so we can go it alone.
“From birth to old age
it’s just you,” said Foyan.
So after T’ang foolery and Tancred
(the Black Pope of Umbanda)
I’ve lived my life in sevens,
not imagining that God could holler,
“Bring me my millennium!”
The sevens are married to each other
by what dogs I owned at the time,
where I fished and hunted,
appealing storms, solstice dinners,
loves and deaths, all the events
that are the marrow of the gods.
O lachrymae sonorense.
From the ground
paced the stars through the ribs
of ocotillo, thin and black
each o’clock till dawn,
rosy but no fingers except
these black thin stalks
directing a billion bright stars,
captured time swelling outward
for us if we are blessed
to be here on the ground,
night sky shot with measured stars,
night sky without end
amen.
NORTH
The mind of which we are unaware is aware of us.
– R.D. LAING
The rising sun not beet
or blood,
but sea-rose red.
I amplified my heartbeat
one thousand times;
the animals at first confused,
then decided I was another
thunder being.
While talking directly to god
my attention waxed and waned.
I have a lot on my mind.
I worked out
to make myself as strong
as water.
After all these years
of holding the world together
I let it roll down the hill
into the river.
One tree leads
to another,
walking on
this undescribed earth.
I have dreamed
myself back
to where
I already am.
On a cold day
bear, coyote, cranes.
On a rainy night
a wolf with yellow eyes.
On a windy day
eleven kestrels looking
down at me.
On a hot afternoon
the ravens floated over
where I sunk
myself in the river.
Way out there
in unknown country
I walked at night
to scare myself.
Who is this other,
the secret sharer,
who directs the hand
that twists the heart,
the voice calling out to me
between feather and stone
the hour before dawn?
Somehow
I have turned into
an old brown man
in a green coat.
Having fulfilled
my obligations
my heart moves lightly
to this downward dance.
BEAR
Bear died standing up,
paws on log,
howling. Shot
right through the heart.
The hunter only wanted the head,
the hide. I ate her
so she wouldn’t go to waste,
dumped naked in a dump,
skinless, looking like ourselves
if we had been flayed,
red as death.
Now there are bear dreams
again for the bear-eater: O god,
the bears have come down the hill,
bears from everywhere on earth,
all colors, sizes, filtering
out of the woods behind the cabin.
A half-mile up
I plummeted toward the river to die,
pushed there. Then pinions creaked;
I flew downstream until I clutched
a white pine, the mind stepping back
to see half-bird, half-bear,
waking in the tree to wet
fur and feathers.
Hotei and bear
sitting side by side,
disappear into each other.
Who is to say
which of us is one?
We loaded the thousand-pound logs
by hand, the truck swaying.
Paused to caress my friend and helper,
the bear beside me, eye to eye,
breath breathing breath.
And now tonight, a big blue
November moon. Startled to find myself
wandering the edge of a foggy
tamarack marsh, scenting the cold
wet air, delicious in the moonglow.
Scratched against swart hemlock,
an itch to give it all up, shuffling
empty-bellied toward home, the yellow
square of cabin light between trees,
the human shape of yellow light,
to turn around,
to give up again this human shape.
TWILIGHT
For the first time
far in the distance
he could see his twilight
wrapping around the green hill
where three rivers start,
and sliding down toward him
through the trees until it reached
the blueberry marsh and stopped,
telling hi
m to go away, not now,
not for the time being.
RETURN TO YESENIN
For only in praising is my heart still mine,
so violently do I know the world
– RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Sonnets to Orpheus
I forgot to say that at the moment of death Yesenin
stood there like a misty-eyed pioneer woman trying
to figure out what happened. Were the children
still in the burning barn with the bawling cows?
He was too sensitive for words, and the idea of a rope
was a wound he couldn’t stop picking at. To step
back from this swinging man twisting clockwise
is to see how we mine ourselves too deeply,
that way down there we can break through the soul’s
rock into a black underground river that sweeps us away.
To be frank, I’d rather live to feed my dogs,
knowing the world says no in ten thousand ways
and yes in only a few. The dogs don’t need another
weeping Jesus on the cross of Art, strumming the scars
to keep them alive, tending them in a private
garden as if our night-blooming tumors were fruit.
I let you go for twenty years and am now only
checking if you’re really dead. There was an urge
to put a few bullets through Nixon’s coffin or a big,
sharp wooden stake, and a girl told me she just saw
Jimi Hendrix at an AIDS benefit in Santa Monica.
How could I disbelieve her when her nipples
were rosebuds, though you had to avoid the snakes
in her hair. If you had hung yourself in Argentina
you would have twisted counterclockwise. We can’t
ask if it was worth it, can we? Anymore than we can
ask a whale its mother’s name. Too bad we couldn’t
go to Mexico together and croak a few small gods
back to life. I’ve entered my third act and am
still following my songs on that thin line between
woods and field, well short of the mouth of your hell.
SONORAN RADIO
(freely translated)