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