by Jim Harrison
Looking at a big moon too long
rusts the eyes.
The raped girl stood all day naked
in the cold rain holding a plastic Virgin.
Their colors ran into the ground.
Tonight the Big Dipper poured down
its dark blood into the Sea of Cortez,
El Oso Grande, the hemorrhaged bear.
In the supermarket beef feet, chicken feet,
one lone octopus losing its charm.
An old woman named Octavia
who stared at my blind eye
carried out the 100 lb. gunnysack of pintos,
a bag of groceries in the other hand.
Just over the mountains
this other country, despised
and forsaken, makes more sense.
It admits people are complicated,
it tries to ignore its sufferings,
it cheats and loves itself,
it admits God might be made
of stone.
The red bird sits
on the dead brown snake.
The lobo admits its mistake
right after eating
the poisoned calf.
In the forms of death
we are all the same;
destinies are traded
at the very highest levels
in very high buildings
in clear view of the dump-pickers.
My heart and your heart!
The horses are running from flies.
Twenty-three horses run
around and around from the flies
in the big mesquite retaque corral
while five boys watch,
each one smaller
than the next biggest.
In the valley of the Toltecs
the American hunter from Palm Beach
shot one thousand white-winged doves
in a single day, all by himself.
The shark was nearly on shore
when it ate the child in three bites
and the mother kicked the shark in the eye.
The dopers killed the old doctor
in the mountain village,
but then the doctor’s patients
stoned the dopers to death,
towing their bodies through town
behind Harley Davidsons.
It is the unpardonable music
stretching the soul
thinner than the skin.
Everyone knows they are not alone
as they suffer the music together
that gives them greater range
for greater suffering.
In the vision
the Virgin who sat in the sycamore
speaks in the voice
of the elegant trogon,
a bird so rare it goes
mateless for centuries.
The lagoon near the oil refinery
outside Tampico caught fire one night.
Everywhere tarpon were jumping
higher than a basketball hoop,
covered with oily flames,
the gill-plates rattling,
throwing off burning oil.
The black dove and white dove
intermarried, producing not brown doves,
but some white doves and black doves.
Down the line, however,
born in our garden a deep-yellow dove
more brilliant than gold
and blind as a bat.
She sits on my shoulder
cooing night songs in the day,
sleeping a few minutes at noon
and always at midnight, wakes
as if from a nightmare
screaming “Guadalupe!”
She said that outside Magdalena
on a mountainside
she counted thirteen guitarists
perched just below a cave
from which they tried to evoke
the usual flow
of blood and flowers.
Up in the borderland mountains
the moon fell slowly on Animas Peak
until it hit it directly
and broke like an egg,
spilling milk on the talus
and scree, sliding in a flood
through a dozen canyons.
The wind rose to fifty knots,
burning the moon
deep into the skin.
In a seaside restaurant
in Puerto Vallarta
a Bosnian woman killed a Serbian man
with a dinner fork,
her big arm pumping the tines
like a jackhammer
before the frightened diners
who decided not to believe it.
She escaped the police net,
fleeing into the green mountains,
fork in hand.
The praying mantis crawled
up the left nostril of our burro
and killed it.
Nightjars and goat suckers,
birds from the far edge of twilight
carrying ghosts from place to place –
Just hitching a ride, the ghosts
say to the birds, slapping
on the harness of black thread.
Even in el norte the whippoorwill’s
nest is lined with the gossamer thread
of this ghost harness.
The cow dogs
tore apart
and ate
the pregnant housecat.
The gray hawk
(only twenty pair left in the U.S.)
flew close over
the vermillion flycatcher
perched on the tip
of the green juniper tree.
The waitress in the diner
where I ate my menudo
told me that Christ actually
bled to death. Back in those days
nails were the same as railroad spikes,
and the sun was hot as hell.
She sees the Resurrection
without irony or backspin.
“We are so lucky,” she said.
“I couldn’t live with all the things
I’ve done wrong in my life.
I feel better when I’m forgiven.”
His dog sneezed
and crawled under a pickup
to get away from the sun.
The guitar and concertina music
swept down the mountainside
from the old cowboy’s funeral,
hat and bridle
hanging from a white cross
in a cluster of admirable
plastic flowers.
The ravens are waiting
in the oak at twilight
for the coyotes to come
and open up the dead steer.
The ravens can’t break through
cowhide with their beaks
and have been there since dawn
eager for the coyotes to get things started.
There’s plenty for everyone.
These black beetles,
big as a thumb,
are locked in dead embrace
either in love or rage.
The bull does not want
to be caught. For five
hours and as many miles
on a hot morning
three cowboys and a half-dozen
cowdogs have worked
the bull toward the pen.
The truck is ready to take
him to the sale. He’s known
as a baloney bull, inferring
his destiny: old, used up,
too lazy and tired to mount cows.
Meanwhile he’s bawling, blowing
snot, charging, hooking a horn
at the horses, dogs, a stray tree.
Finally loaded, I said good-bye
to his blood-red eyes.
He rumbles, raises his huge neck
and bawls at the sun.
The cow dog licks her cancerous
> and bloated teats.
Otherwise, she’s the happiest
dog I know, always smiling,
always trying to help out.
I gave the woman seven roses
and she smiled, holding
the bouquet a couple of hours
at dusk before saying good-bye.
The next day I gave her
a brown calf and three chickens
and she took me to bed.
Over her shoulder a rose
petal fell for an hour.
From a thicket full
of red cardinals
burst seven black javelinas,
including three infants
the size of housecats.
There were so many birds
at the mountain spring
they drove one insane
at dawn and twilight;
bushes clotted with birds
like vulgar Christmas trees.
I counted thirteen hundred
of a hundred different kinds,
all frozen in place
when the gray hawk flew by,
its keening voice
the precise weight of death.
Magdalena kept taking off her clothes
for hours until there was nothing left,
not even a trace of moisture on the leather chair.
Perhaps it was because
she was a government employee
and had lost a child.
It was the sleight of her hand.
I never saw her again.
Another bowl of menudo
and she’s on a rampage in a black
Guadalupe T-shirt: “We can’t keep
working through the used part every day.
Everyone is tired of dope. Day in, day out,
the newspapers are full of dope news,
people are shot dead and not-so-dead,
sent to prison, and both police and criminals
are so bored with dope they weep
day and night, going about their jobs,
living and dying from this stupid dope.
There has to be more than dope. Understand?”
I dreamed here
before I arrived.
Chuck and whir
of elf owls above firelight,
dozens in the black oak
staring down into the fire
beyond which a thousand white sycamore
limbs move their legs into the night.
Sonoran moon gets red
again as she sets in the dust
we’ve colored with blood.
PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS
1976–1990
HELLO WALLS
to Willie Nelson
How heavy I am. My feet sink into the ground and my knees
are rubbery, my head and brain propped with aluminum braces.
Life is short! I’m sinking through it at the speed of sound.
A feather is dropping with me in the vacuum. At bottom we’ll
prove nothing except the fall is over for both of us. No matter
that I am richer than Satanta the Kiowa chief if you subtract
those millions of verdant acres which we did. In the prison
hospital he hurls himself headfirst from the third-story window.
Who wants to die like a white Christian? Even his animal skins
forgave him. But this has nothing to do with me – out the window
I can’t see the army approach with cocked howitzers. There’s
nothing but snow. How to lift myself out of this Egypt, wriggle
free, fly out of the page, out of the human condition like
a miraculous crow, like Satanta from the window, like birds
beneath the buffalo feet, griffins to a nest at the cathedral’s
top. Fly, fly away the old song goes, climb a single note
and follow it, crazed mariachi, a shot tomcat, or Huxley
near death from cancer drops ten thousand hits of acid to go out
on a truly stupendous note, far above King David’s zither,
the shriek of our space probe hitting Venus plum in the middle.
– from Aisling, summer 1976
SCRUBBING THE FLOOR THE NIGHT A GREAT LADY DIED
Ruffian 1972–1975
Sunday, with two weeks of heat lifting from us in a light rain. A good day for work with the break in weather; then the race, the great horse faltering, my wife and daughter leaving the room in tears, the dinner strangely silent, with a dull, metallic yellow cast to the evening sun. We turn from the repeats, once is so much more than enough. So the event fades and late in the night writing in the kitchen I look at the floor soiled by the Airedales in the heatwave, tracking in the brackish dirt from the algaecovered pond. I want the grace of this physical gesture, filling the pail, scrubbing the floor after midnight, sweet country music from the radio and a drink or two; then the grotesque news bringing me up from the amnesia of the floor. How could a creature of such beauty merely disap- pear? I saw her as surely as at twilight I watched our own horses graze in the pasture. How could she wake so frantic, as if from a terrible dream? Then to continue with my scrubbing, saying it’s only a horse but knowing that if I cannot care about a horse, I cannot care about earth herself. For she was so surely of earth, in earth; once so animate, sprung in some final, perfect form, running, running, saying, “Look at me, look at me, what could be more wonderful than the way I move, tell me if there’s something more wonderful, I’m the same as a great whale sounding.” But then who am I sunk on the floor scrubbing at this bitterness? It doesn’t matter. A great creature died who took her body as far as bodies go toward perfection and I wonder how like Crazy Horse she seems to leave us so far behind.
– from Natural World, 1982
THE SAME GOOSE MOON
Peach sky
at sunset,
then (for a god’s sake)
one leaf whirled
across the face
of the big October moon.
– from Book for Sensei, 1990
NEW POEMS
1998
GEO–BESTIARY
1
I can hear the cow dogs sleeping
in the dust, the windmill’s
creak above thirty-three
sets of shrill mating birds.
The vultures fly above the corrals
so softly the air ignores them.
In all of the eons, past and future,
not one day clones itself.
2
I walked the same circular path today
in the creek bottom three times.
The first: a blur, roar of snowmelt
in creek, brain jumbling like the rolling
of river stones I watched carefully
with swim goggles long ago, hearing
the stones clack, click, and slow shuffle
along the gravel.
The second time: the creek is muddy,
a Mexican jay follows me at a polite
distance, the mind slows to the color
of wet, beige grass, a large raindrop
hits the bridge of my nose, the remote
mountain canyon has a fresh dusting
of snow. My head hurts pleasantly.
The third time: my life depends
on the three million two hundred seventy-seven
thousand three hundred and thirty-three
pebbles locked into the ground so I
don’t fall through the thin skin of earth
on which there is a large coyote-turd full
of Manzanita berries I stepped over twice
without noticing it, a piece of ancient chert,
a fragment of snakeskin, an owl eye
staring from a hole in an Emory oak,
the filaments of eternity hanging in the earthly
air like the frailest of beacons seen
from a ship mortally far out in the sea.
3
<
br /> That dew-wet glistening wild iris
doesn’t know where it comes from,
what drove the green fuse, the poet said,
up and out into the flowering I see
in the dank flat of the creek, my eye
drawn there by a Virginia rail who keeps
disappearing as they do, unlike the flower
which stays exactly in the place the heron stands
every day, the flower no doubt fertilized
by heron shit, or deeper – those rocky bones
my daughter found of the Jurassic lizard.
I said to the flower one brain-bleeding morning
that I don’t know where I came from either
or where I’m going, such a banal statement
however true. O wild iris here today and soon gone,
the earth accepts us both without comment.
4
Some eco-ninny released
at least a hundred tame white doves
at our creek crossing. What a feast
he innocently offered, coyotes in the yard
for the first time, a pair of great horned
owls, male and then the female
ululating, two ferruginous hawks,
and then at dawn today all song-
birds vamoosed at a startling shadow,
a merlin perched in the willow,
ur-falcon, bird-god, sweetly vengeful,
the white feathers of its meal,
a clump, among others, of red-spotted snow.
5
The little bull calf gets his soft pink
nuts clipped off, then is released
in a state of bafflement, wandering
this way and that, perhaps feeling
a tad lighter, an actual lacuna.
But like the rest of the culture these creatures
are quick healers, have been dumbed down
so far from their wild state they think we’re harmless.