The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

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The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems Page 27

by Jim Harrison


  24

  A whiff of that dead bird along the trail

  is a whiff of what I’d smell like

  if I was lucky enough to die

  well back in the woods or out in the desert.

  The heavy Marine compass doesn’t remind

  me that I’m somewhere in America,

  likely in northern Michigan by the maple and alder,

  the wildly blooming sugarplum and dogwood,

  wandering aimlessly in great circles

  as your gait tends to pull you slowly aside,

  my one leg slightly distorted at birth

  though I was fifty before my mother told me,

  but then from birth we’re all mortally wounded.

  When I was a stray dog in New York City

  in 1957, trying to eat on a buck a day

  while walking thousands of blocks

  in that human forest I thought was enchanted,

  not wanting to miss anything but missing

  everything because at nineteen dreams

  daily burst the brain, dismay the senses,

  the interior weeping drowning your steps,

  your mind an underground river

  running counter to your tentative life.

  “Our body is a molded river,” said wise Novalis.

  Bloody brain and heart, also mind and soul finally

  becoming a single river, flowing in a great circle,

  flowing from darkness to blessed darkness,

  still wondering above all else what kind of beast am I?

  25

  The resplendent female “elegant trogon,”

  her actual name, appeared at my study

  window the very moment my heroine died

  (in a novel of course) so that my hair

  bristled like the time a lion coughed right

  outside our thin screen-walled shack.

  What does this mean? Nothing whatsoever,

  except itself, I am too quick to answer.

  This bird is so rare she never saw it.

  I had expected her soul to explode

  into a billion raindrops, falling on the farm

  where she was born, or far out in the ocean

  where she drowned, precisely where I once saw

  two giant sea turtles making love.

  Full fathom five thy lovely sister lies,

  tumbling north in the Gulfstream current,

  but then the soul rose up as vapor, blown west-

  ward to the Sea of Cortez, up a canyon, inhabiting

  this quetzal bird who chose to appear at my window.

  This all took three seconds by my geologic watch.

  26

  In Montana the badger looks at me in fear

  and buries himself where he stood

  in the soft sandy gravel

  only moments ago. I have to think

  it’s almost like our own deaths

  assuming we had the wit to save money

  by digging our own graves or gathering

  the wood for the funeral pyre.

  But then the badger does it to stay alive, carrying

  his thicket, his secret room in his powerful claws.

  27

  She said in LA of course that she’d be reincarnated as an Indian princess, and I tried to recall any Lakota or Anishinabe princesses. I said how about wheat berries, flakes of granite on a mountainside, a green leaf beginning to dry out on the ground, a microbe within a dog turd, the windfall apple no one finds, an ordinary hawk fledgling hitting a high-tension wire, apricot blossoms from that old fallow tree? Less can be more she agreed. It might be nice to try something else, say a tree that only gets to dance if the wind comes up but I refuse to believe this lettuce might be Grandma – more likely the steak that they don’t serve here. We go from flesh to flesh, she thought, with her nose ring and tongue tack, inscrutable to me but doubtless genetic. There is no lesser flesh whether it grows feathers or fur, scales or hairy skin. The coyote wishes to climb the moon-beam she cannot be, the wounded raven to stay in the cloud forever. Whatever we are we don’t quite know it, waiting for a single thought as lovely as April’s sycamore.

  28

  The wallet is as big as earth

  and we snuffle, snorkel, lip lap

  at money’s rankest genitals,

  buried there as money gophers, money worms,

  hibernate our lives away with heads

  well up money’s asshole, eating, drinking,

  sleeping there in money’s shitty dark.

  That’s money, folks, the perverse love

  thereof, as if we swam carrying an anchor

  or the blinders my grandpa’s horses wore

  so that while ploughing they wouldn’t notice

  anything but the furrow ahead, not certainly

  the infinitely circular horizon of earth.

  Not the money for food and bed but the endless

  brown beyond that. I’m even saving

  up for my past, by god, healing the twelve-hour

  days in the fields or laying actual concrete blocks.

  The present passes too quickly to notice

  and I’ve never had a grip on the future,

  even as an idea. As a Pleistocene dunce

  I want my wife and children to be safe

  in the past, and then I’ll look up from my money-

  fucking grubbing work to watch the evening

  shadows fleeing across the green field next door,

  tethered to these shadows dragging toward night.

  29

  How can I be alone when these brain cells

  chat to me their million messages

  a minute. But sitting there in the ordinary

  trance that is any mammal’s birthright, say on a desert

  boulder or northern stump, a riverbank,

  we can imitate a barrel cactus, a hemlock tree,

  the water that flows through time as surely

  as ourselves. The mind loses its distant

  machine-gun patter, becomes a frog’s

  occasional croak. A trout’s last jump in the dark,

  a horned owl’s occasional hoot,

  or in the desert alone at night

  the voiceless stars light my primate

  fingers that I lift up to curl

  around their bright cosmic bodies.

  30

  How much better these actual dreams

  than the vulgar “hoped for,” the future’s

  golden steps which are really old

  cement blocks stacked at a door that can

  never open because we

  are already inside.

  Is all prayer just barely short of the lip

  of whining as if, however things are,

  they can’t possibly be quite right

  (what I don’t have I probably should),

  the sole conviction praying for sick children?

  But true dreams arrived without being

  summoned, incomprehensibly old and without

  your consent: the animal that is running

  is you under the wide gray sky, the sound

  of those banal drumbeats is the heart’s true reflection,

  all water over your head is bottomless,

  the sky above we’ve learned quite without limits.

  Running, he wears the skins of animals

  to protect his ass in the misery of running,

  stopping at the edge of the green earth

  without the fulsome courage to jump off.

  He builds a hut there and makes the music

  he’s never heard except in the pulse of dreams.

  31

  A few long miles up Hog Canyon

  this rare late-March heat is drawing forth

  the crotalids from their homes of earth and rock

  where they had sensed me scrambling over them

  while hunting quail. It is the dread

  greenish brown Mojave I fear the
most,

  known locally as “dog killer,” lifting

  its wary head higher than you think possible,

  coiling its length beneath itself

  as if a boxer could carry a single, fatal punch.

  This is the farthest reach from the petting zoo

  like my Africa’s dream black mamba.

  I tell her I’m sorry I shot a cousin rattler

  in our bedroom. How idiotic. She’s a cocked

  .357 snake, rattling “Get the hell out of here.

  This land is my land when I awake.

  Walk here in the cool of morning or not at all.”

  She’s my childhood myth of the kiss of death

  and I’m amazed how deftly I fling myself backward

  down a long steep hill, my setter Rose frightened

  by my unconscious, verbless bellows. Perhaps

  if I’m dying from some painful disease

  I’ll catch and hold you like Cleopatra’s asp

  to my breast, a truly inventive suicide.

  32

  How the love of Tarzan in Africa haunted my childhood, strapped with this vivid love of an imaginary wild, the white orphan as king of nature with all creatures at his beck and call, monkey talk, Simba! Kreegah! Go-manganini! The mysterious Jane was in his tree house in leather loincloth and bra before one had quite figured out why she should be there. Perhaps this was all only a frantic myth to allay our fear of the darkest continent and help us defeat a world that will never be ours after we had tried so hard to dispose of our own indians. The blacks were generally grand if not influenced too much by an evil witch doctor, or deceived by venal white men, often German or French, while a current Tarzan, far from the great Johnny Weismuller, has the body builder’s more than ample tits, tiny waist and blow-dried hair, Navajo booties somehow, while the newest Jane has a Dutch accent and runs through a Mexican forest (if you know flora) in shorts and cowboy boots screaming in absolute alarm at nearly everything though she simply passed out when a black tied her rather attractively way up in a tree. What can we make of this Aryan myth gone truly bad, much worse than Sambo’s tigers turning to butter for his pancakes, much more decrepit than noble Robin Hood; or how we made our landscape safe for mega-agriculture and outdoor cow factories by shooting all the buffalo, and red kids fast asleep in tents at Sand Creek and elsewhere, the Church climbing to heaven on the backs of Jews; or that we could destroy the Yellow Plague in Vietnam? The girl or boy with their brown dog in the woods on Sunday afternoon must learn first to hold their noses at requests to march. But Tarzan swinging over the whole world on his convenient vines, knows that bugs, snakes, beasts and birds, are of the angelic orders, safe forever from men and their thundersticks and rancid clothes, and Jane’s lambent butt and English accent singing him to sleep in their tree-top home, she waving down at the profuse eyelashes of a sleeping elephant.

  33

  Coyote’s bloody face makes me

  wonder what he ate, also reminds

  me of when I sliced my hand

  sharpening the scythe to cut weeds.

  What the hell is this blood we mostly see

  on TV, movies, the doctor’s office, hospitals?

  The first two remote and dishonest,

  the second two less so but readily expunged,

  but not the massive dark-red pool beneath

  the shrimper’s neck in 1970, his trachea

  a still-pulsing calamari ring.

  I don’t care how many quarts of this red

  juice I’m carrying around as it flows

  through its pitch-dark creeks and rivers.

  We must learn to rock our own cradles.

  I don’t want to get ahead or behind myself

  fueled by this red gasoline, legs stretching

  as if eager to pass over the edge of earth

  or trotting backward into the inglorious past.

  Tonight its pump is thumping as when an airplane’s

  engine stutters, thinking too much of those I loved

  who died long ago, the girl sitting in the apple

  tree, the red sun sinking beneath her feet,

  how god plucked her off earth with his careless

  tweezers because she plucked a flower with her toes.

  34

  Not how many different birds I’ve seen

  but how many have seen me,

  letting the event go unremarked

  except for the quietest sense of malevolence,

  dead quiet, then restarting their lives

  after fear, not with song, which is reserved

  for lovers, but the harsh and quizzical

  chatter with which we all get by:

  but if she or he passes by and the need

  is felt we hear the music that transcends all fear,

  and sometimes the simpler songs that greet sunrise,

  rain or twilight. Here I am.

  They sing what and where they are.

  INDEX OF TITLES

  Acting, 343

  After Ikkyū: 1–57, 363

  After Reading Takahashi, 299

  After the Anonymous Swedish, 89

  American Girl, 75

  Awake, 123

  Bear, 394

  Birthday, 287

  Brand New Statue of Liberty, The, 337

  Cabin Poem, 346

  Cardinal, 34

  Chatham Ghazal, The, 292

  Clear Water 3, 288

  Cobra, 335

  Cold August, 82

  Complaint, 48

  Counting Birds, 356

  Cowgirl, 121

  Coyote No. 1, 383

  Credo, After E.P., 30

  Dancing, 352

  Davenport Lunar Eclipse, The, 381

  David, 12

  Dawn Whiskey, 90

  Dead Deer, 46

  Dōgen’s Dream, 289

  Domestic Poem for Portia, A, 229

  Drinking Song, 122

  Dusk, 31

  Epithalamium, 281

  Exercise, 13

  Fair/Boy Christian Takes a Break, 19

  February Suite, 22

  February Swans, 84

  Followers, 283

  Four Matrices, 232

  Fox Farm, 28

  Frog, 278

  Garden, 37

  Gathering April, 296

  Geo-Bestiary: 1–34, 419

  Ghazals: I–LXV, 129

  Going Back, 43

  Hello Walls, 411

  Hitchhiking, 44

  Homily, 328

  Horse (“A / quarter horse…”), 38

  Horse (“What if it were…”), 334

  Hospital, 120

  Idea of Balance Is to Be Found in Herons and Loons, The, 353

  In Interims: Outlyer, 111

  John Severin Walgren, 1874–1962, 36

  Kinship, 21

  Kobun, 326

  Last Ghazal, A, 228

  Legenda, 91

  Letters to Yesenin: 1–30, 197

  Li Ho, 47

  Lisle’s River, 32

  Locations, 99

  Looking Forward to Age, 327

  Lullaby for a Daughter, 79

  Malediction, 39

  March Walk, 294

  Marriage Ghazal, 293

  Missy 1966–1971, 231

  Morning, 20

  Moving, 87

  My First Day As a Painter, 284

  My Friend the Bear, 345

  Natural World, 86

  New Love, 340

  Night in Boston, 83

  Nightmare, 29

  Noon, 286

  North, 391

  North American Image Cycle, 234

  Northern Michigan, 16

  Not Writing My Name, 277

  Park at Night, 42

  Poem, 9

  Porpoise, 336

  Postscript, 227

  Redolence for Nims, A, 282

  Return, 49

  Return to Yesenin, 397

  Returning at Night, 18

&nbs
p; Returning to Earth, 247

  Reverie, 27

  Rich Folks, Poor Folks, and Neither, 348

  Rooster, 279

  Same Goose Moon, The, 413

  Scrubbing the Floor the Night a Great

  Lady Died, 412

  Sequence, 80

  Sequence of Women, A, 14

  Sign, The, 65

  Sketch for a Job-Application Blank, 10

  Small Poem, 355

  Sonoran Radio, 399

  Sound, 45

  Southern Cross, 330

  Suite to Appleness, 60

  Suite to Fathers, 55

  Sullivan Poem, 331

  Theory and Practice of Rivers, The, 303

  Thin Ice, 85

  “This is cold salt…,” 35

  Three Night Songs, 33

  Time Suite, 384

  Times Atlas, The, 338

  Trader, 119

  Traverse City Zoo, 26

  Twilight, 396

  Waiting, 285

  Walking, 53

  Walter of Battersea, 297

  War Suite, 70

  Weeping, 290

  What He Said When I Was Eleven, 341

  White, 88

  Woman from Spiritwood, The, 295

  Word Drunk, 40

  Year’s Changes, A, 92

  Young Bull, 41

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES

  A boot called Botte Sauvage renders rattlers harmless but they, 178

  A few long miles up Hog Canyon, 450

 

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