The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

by Jim Harrison

In the old days sometimes longhorns,

  like the Lakota had, had the sense to attack

  Cavalry contingents, goring what could be gored.

  Even now a few, not quite bred or beaten

  into senescence, struggle wildly with these invisible

  telemetric collars wrapped tightly around our necks

  though it’s fatally illegal to take them off.

  6

  O BLM, BLM, and NFS,

  what has your mother, the earth,

  done to you that you rape and scalp

  her so savagely, this beautiful woman

  now mostly scar tissue?

  7

  O that girl, only young men

  dare to look at her directly

  while I manage the most sidelong of glances:

  olive-skinned with a Modigliani throat,

  lustrous obsidian hair, the narrowest

  of waists and high French bottom, ample

  breasts she tries to hide in a loose blouse.

  Though Latino her profile is from a Babylonian

  frieze and when she walks her small white dog

  with brown spots she fairly floats along,

  looking neither left nor right, meeting no one’s

  glance as if beauty was a curse. In the grocery

  store when I drew close her scent was jacaranda,

  the tropical flower that makes no excuses.

  This geezer’s heart swells stupidly to the dampish

  promise. I walk too often in the cold shadow

  of the mountain wall up the arroyo behind the house.

  Empty pages are dry ice, numbing the hands and heart.

  If I weep I do so in the shower so that no one,

  not even I, can tell. To see her is to feel

  time’s cold machete against my grizzled neck,

  puzzled that again beauty has found her home in threat.

  8

  Many a sharp-eyed pilot has noticed

  while flying in late October

  that remnant hummingbirds rob piggyback

  rides on the backs of southward-flying geese.

  9

  I hedge when I say “my farm.”

  We don’t ever own, we barely rent this earth.

  I’ve even watched a boulder age,

  changing the texture of its mosses

  and cracking from cold back in 1983.

  Squinting, it becomes a mountain fissure.

  I’ve sat on this rock so long we celebrate

  together our age, our mute geologic destiny.

  10

  I know a private mountain range with a big bowl in its center that you find by following the narrowest creek bed, sometimes crawling until you struggle through a thicket until you reach two large cupped hands of stone in the middle of which is a hill, a promontory, which would be called a mountain back home. There is iron in this hill and it sucks down summer lightning, thousands and thousands of strokes through time, shattering the gigantic top into a field of undramatic crystals that would bring a buck a piece at a rock show. I was here in a dark time and stood there and said, “I have put my poem in order on the threshold of my tongue,” quoting someone from long, long ago, then got the hell off the mountain due to tremors of undetermined source. Later that night sleeping under an oak a swarm of elf owls (Micrathene whitneyi) descended to a half-dozen feet above my head and a thousand white sycamores undulated in the full moon, obviously the living souls of lightning strokes upside down along the arroyo bed. A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven’t quite found the words.

  11

  Today the warblers undulate

  fishlike, floating down,

  lifting up with wing beats

  while below me in the creek

  minnows undulate birdlike,

  floating down, lifting up with fin beats.

  For a minute I lose the sense

  of up and down.

  12

  I was hoping to travel the world

  backward in my red wagon,

  one knee in, the other foot pushing.

  I was going to see the sights I’d imagined:

  Spanish buildings, trellised with flowers,

  a thousand Rapunzels brushing their long

  black hair with street vendors singing

  the lyrics of Lorca. I’d be towed

  by a stray Miura over the green Pyrenees,

  turning the bull loose before French customs.

  At the edge of the forest René Char was roasting

  a leg of lamb over a wood fire. We shared

  a gallon of wine while mignonettes frolicked for us.

  This all occurred to me forty-two

  years ago while hoeing corn and it’s time

  for it all to come to pass along with my canoe

  trip through Paris, with Jean Moreau trailing

  a hand in the crystalline Seine, reading me Robert Desnos.

  Why shouldn’t this happen? I have to rid

  myself of this last land mine, the unlived life.

  13

  Try as you might there’s nothing

  you can do about bird shadows

  except try to head them off

  and abruptly stop, letting them pass

  by in peace. Looking up and down

  at the very same moment is difficult

  for a single-eyed man.

  The ones coming behind you,

  often cautious crows or ravens,

  strike hard against the back and nape nerve.

  Like most of life your wariness

  is useless. You wobble

  slightly dumbstruck, queasy,

  then watch the shadow flit across

  the brown wind-tormented grass.

  14

  As a geezer one grows tired of the story

  of Sisyphus. Let that boulder stay

  where it is and, by its presence,

  exactly where it wished to be,

  but then I’m old enough to have

  forgotten what the boulder stood for?

  I think of all of the tons of junk

  the climbers have left up on Everest,

  including a few bodies. Even the pyramids,

  those imitation mountains, say to the gods,

  “We can do it too.” Despite planes

  you can’t get off the earth for long.

  Even the dead meat strays behind, changing

  shape, the words drift into the twilight

  across the lake. I’m not bold enough

  to give a poetry reading while alone

  far out in the desert to a gathering

  of saguaro and organ-pipe cactus

  or listen to my strophes reverberate off a mountain

  wall. At dawn I sat on a huge boulder

  near Cave Creek deep in the Chiracahuas

  and listened to it infer that it didn’t want

  to go way back up the mountain but liked

  it near the creek where gravity bought

  its passage so long ago. Everest told me

  to get this crap off my head or stay at home

  and make your own little pyramids.

  15

  Concha is perhaps seven. No one knows this cow dog’s age for sure but of course she could care less. Let us weep for the grandeur of rebellious women. After a lifetime of service as a faithful tender of cattle her mind has changed itself. She’s become daffy and won’t do her job. She’s the alpha bitch and leads the other cow dogs off on nightly runs after javelina and deer, maybe herding steers when she shouldn’t, driving horses mad. They return worthlessly exhausted. Now the death sentence hangs above her mottled gray head like a halo of flies. She’s chained to a mesquite, barking for hours without pause. I bring her biscuits on frosty mornings and she shivers without in her solitary confinement but inside it’s obvious that she
’s hot and singing. Her head with its streaks of barbed-wire scars awaits the trigger finger. But then on a dark, wet morning, the grace of El Niño in this parched land, her reprieve arrives. She’s being exiled to a ranch in Mexico just south of here where they need a crazed bitch who’s kick-ass with range bulls. She’ll drive one into an outhouse if that’s what you want. This is a triumph beyond good-byes and I watch through the window as she leaves the barnyard in the back of a pickup, the wind and rain in her face, baring her teeth in anger or a smile, her uncertain future, which by nature she ignores, so much better to me than none.

  16

  My favorite stump straddles a gully a dozen

  miles from any human habitation.

  My eschatology includes scats, animal poop,

  scatology so that when I nestle under this stump

  out of the rain I see the scats of bear, bobcat,

  coyote. I won’t say that I feel at home

  under this vast white pine stump, the roots

  spread around me, so large in places no arms

  can encircle them, as if you were under the body

  of a mythic spider, the thunder ratcheting

  the sky so that the earth hums beneath you.

  Here is a place to think about nothing,

  which is what I do. If the rain beats down

  hard enough tiny creeks form beside my shit-strewn

  pile of sand. The coyote has been eating mice,

  the bear berries, the bobcat a rabbit. It’s dry

  enough so it doesn’t smell except for ancient

  wet wood and gravel, pine pitch, needles. Luckily

  a sandhill crane nests nearby so that in June

  if I doze I’m awakened by her cracked

  and prehistoric cry, waking startled, feeling

  the two million years I actually am.

  17

  I was sent far from my land of bears.

  It wasn’t an asylum but a resting place

  to get well buttoned-up against my fugal state

  wherein whirl is both the king and queen,

  the brain-gods who stir a thousand revolutions

  a second the contents of this graying cocotte.

  Stop it please. Please stop it please.

  There was one other poet from Yankeeland

  who rubbed himself, including private parts,

  with sandpaper. His doctor searched his room,

  even his anus where he had secreted a tightly

  bound roll. Across the wide yard and women’s

  quarters a lovely soprano sang TV jingles.

  One day it was, “Fly the friendly skies of United,”

  over and over. Her friend fed her peanut butter

  and marshmallows to quell her voice, plus

  a daily goblet of Thorazine. If you dive down deep

  enough there are no words to bring you up. Not my

  problem. If you fly too high there are no words

  to help you land. I went back to my land of bears

  and learned to bob like an apple on the river’s surface.

  18

  I was commanded, in a dream naturally,

  to begin the epitaphs of thirty-three friends

  without using grand words like love pity pride

  sacrifice doom honor heaven hell earth:

  1. O you deliquescent flower

  2. O you always loved long naps

  3. O you road-kill Georgia possum

  4. O you broken red lightbulb

  5. O you mosquito smudge fire

  6. O you pitiless girl missing a toe

  7. O you big fellow in pale-blue shoes

  8. O you poet without a book

  9. O you lichen without tree or stone

  10. O you lion without a throat

  11. O you homeless scholar with dirty feet

  12. O you jungle bird without a jungle

  13. O you city with a single street

  14. O you tiny sun without an earth

  15. Forgive me for saying good-night quietly

  16. Forgive me for never answering the phone

  17. Forgive me for sending too much money

  18. Pardon me for fishing during your funeral

  19. Forgive me for thinking of your lovely ass

  20. Pardon me for burning your last book

  21. Forgive me for making love to your widow

  22. Pardon me for never mentioning you

  23. Forgive me for not knowing where you’re buried

  24. O you forgotten famous person

  25. O you great singer of banal songs

  26. O you shrike in the darkest thicket

  27. O you river with too many dams

  28. O you orphaned vulture with no meat

  29. O you who sucked a shotgun to orgasm

  30. Forgive me for raising your ghost so often

  31. Forgive me for naming a bird after you

  32. Forgive me for keeping a nude photo of you

  33. We’ll all see God but not with our eyes

  19

  I sat on a log fallen over a river and heard

  that like people each stretch had a different voice

  varying with the current, the nature

  of its bed and banks, logjams, boulders,

  alder or cedar branches, low-slung

  and sweeping the current, the hush of eddies.

  In a deep pool I saw the traces of last night’s moon.

  20

  Who is it up to if it isn’t up to you?

  In motels I discover how ugly I am,

  the mirrors at home too habitual to be noted.

  I chose methodically to be anti-beautiful,

  Christian fat keeps you safe from adultery!

  With delight I drown my lungs in smoke

  and drink that extra bottle of wine

  that brings me so much closer to the gods.

  Up the road a dozen wetbacks were caught

  because one stopped at a ranch house, desperate

  for a cigarette. Olive oil and pork sausage

  are pratfalls, an open secret to the stove.

  In the newspaper I read that thirty-two

  dairy cows ate themselves to death on grain

  by shaking loose an automatic feeder

  (“They just don’t know any better,” the vet said).

  Of course false modesty is a family habit.

  The zone-tailed hawk looks like and mimics

  the harmless turkey vultures with which it often

  flies for concealment, stoops in flight and devours

  the creatures who thought, “It’s just a vulture.”

  21

  In the Cabeza Prieta from a hillock I saw no human sign for a thousand square miles except for a stray intestinal vapor trail with which we mar the sky. I naturally said, “I’m alone.” The immense ocotillo before me is a thousand-foot-high rope to heaven but then you can’t climb its spiny branches. In Daniel’s Wash I heard and saw the great mother of crotalids, a rattler, and at a distance her rattles sounded exactly like Carmen Miranda’s castanets, but closer, a string of firecrackers. In 1957 in New York I was with Anne Frank who was trying to be a writer but they wouldn’t buy her dark stories. We lived on Macdougal south of Houston and I worked as a sandhog digging tunnels until I was crushed to death. She cooked fairly well (flanken, chicken livers, herring salad). Now Ed Abbey rides down from the Growler Mountains on a huge mountain ram, bareback and speechless. This place is a fearsome goddess I’ve met seven times in a decade. She deranges my mind with the strangest of beauties, her Venusian flora mad to puncture the skin. It’s ninety degrees and I wonder if I’m walking so far within her because I wish to die, so parched I blow dust from my throat. Finally I reach the hot water in my car and weep at the puny sight. Is this what I’ve offered this wild beauty? Literally a goddamned car, a glittering metallic tumor.

  22

  “Life’s too short to be a whore anymore,”

  I sang
out to the Atlantic Ocean

  from my seaside room in St. Malo,

  the brain quite frugal until I took

  a long walk seaward at low tide

  and watched closely old French ladies

  gathering crustaceans. When they left

  they shook their fingers saying, “marée, marée,”

  and I watched them walk away toward shore

  where I had no desire to go. A few

  stopped and waved their arms wildly.

  The tide! The tide goes out, then comes in

  in this place huge, twenty feet or so,

  the tidal bore sweeping slowly in

  but faster than me. I still didn’t want to leave

  because I was feeling like a very old whore

  who wanted to drown, but then this wispy

  ego’s pulse drifted away with a shitting gull.

  Before I died I must eat the three-leveled

  “plateau” of these crustaceans with two bottles

  of Sancerre. It’s dinner that drives the beaten

  dog homeward, tail half-up, half-down,

  no dog whore but trotting legs, an empty stomach.

  23

  My soul grew weak and polluted during captivity, a zoo creature, frantic but most often senescent. One day in the Upper Peninsula I bought a painting at a yard sale of the supposed interior of a clock. The tag said, “Real Oil Painting Nineteen Bucks.” People around me grinned, knowing I wasn’t a yard-sale pro. Never go to a supermarket when you’re hungry, my mother said, or a yard sale after a Côtes du Rhône. The painting was quite dark as there’s little sunlight within clocks but the owners had wiped it with oil and there was a burnished glow to its burnt sienna. I couldn’t see into the cavern in the center but I didn’t have my glasses with me. Back at the cabin I was lucky enough to have the magnifying glass that comes with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the true source of agony. There were grinning mice sailing along on Eilshemius-type clouds in a corner of the clock’s metallic shell, and miniature assemblage print that said, “flyways, byways, highways” in a lighter cavern, also “Je souffre but so what,” also “I am a buggered cherubim,” an alarming statement. On the central cavern walls there were the usual cogs and wheels, straight-forward, not melting Dali-esques. In the lower left-hand corner it was signed “Felicia” with a feminine bottom from which emerged a candle, lighting the artist’s name. Here was a wedding present for a couple you didn’t really like. Children, even future artists, should never take the backs off of discarded Big Bens. They’ll never make sense of these glum, interior stars with their ceaseless ticking, saying that first you’re here and then you’re not.