by Jim Harrison
made up mostly of old scar tissue
from before we learned how to protect ourselves.
It’s hard to imagine that this powerful
river had to begin with a single drop
far into the mountains, a seep or trickle
from rocks and then the runoff from snowmelt.
Of course watershed means the shedding
of water, rain, a hundred creeks, a thousand
small springs. My mind can’t quite
contain this any more than my own inception
in a singe sperm joining a single egg
utterly invisible, hidden in Mother’s moist
dark. Out of almost nothing, for practical
purposes nothing, then back as ancient
children to the great nothing again,
the song of man and water moving to the ocean.
RIVER VI
I thought years ago that old Heraclitus was wrong.
You can’t step into the same river even once.
The water slips around your foot like liquid time
and you can’t dry it off after its passage.
Don’t bother taking your watch to the river,
the moving water is a glorious second hand.
Properly understood the memory loses nothing
and we humans are never allowed to let our minds
sit on the still bank and have a simple picnic.
I had an unimaginable dream when young
of being a river horse that could easily plunge upstream.
Perhaps it came from our huge black mare June
whom I rode bareback as she swam the lake
in big circles, always getting out where she got in.
Meanwhile this river is surrounded by mountains
covered with lodgepole pines that are mortally diseased,
browning in the summer sun. Everyone knows
that lightning will strike and Montana burn.
We all stay quiet about it, this blessed oxygen
that makes the world a crematory. Only the water is safe.
RIVER VII
The last trip to the river this year. Tonight I think
of the trout swimming in a perfect, moonless
dark, navigating in the current by the tiny pinpoint
of stars, night wind rippling the eddies,
and always if you stick your head under
the surface, the slight sound of the pebbles
rubbing against pebbles. Today I saw two dead
pelicans. I heard they are shot because they eat
trout, crows shot because they eat duck eggs,
wolves shot for eating elk or for chasing
a bicyclist in Yellowstone. Should we be shot
for eating the world and giving back our puke?
Way down in Notch Bottom, ancient winter camp
for long-gone Indians, I am sweetly consoled
by our absolute absence except for a stretch
of fence on the bank, half washed away
by the current, a sequence of No Trespassing signs
to warn us away from a pricey though miasmic swamp.
The river can’t heal everything. You have to do your part.
We’ve even bruised the moon. Still the birds are a chorus
with the moving flow, clearly relatives of Mozart,
the brown trout so lovely the heart flutters. Back home
something has eaten the unfledged swallows. It wasn’t us.
I’m on another river now, it’s swollen and turbulent.
“The spirit is here. Are you?” I ask myself.
SPRING
Something new in the air today, perhaps the struggle of the bud to become a leaf. Nearly two weeks late it invaded the air but then what is two weeks to life herself? On a cool night there is a break from the struggle of becoming. I suppose that’s why we sleep. In a childhood story they spoke of “the land of enchantment.” We crawl to it, we short-lived mammals, not realizing that we are already there. To the gods the moon is the entire moon but to us it changes second by second because we are always fish in the belly of the whale of earth. We are encased and can’t stray from the house of our bodies. I could say that we are released, but I don’t know, in our private night when our souls explode into a billion fragments then calmly regather in a black pool in the forest, far from the cage of flesh, the unremitting “I.” This was a dream and in dreams we are forever alone walking the ghost road beyond our lives. Of late I see waking as another chance at spring.
SKY
Here along the Mexican border
working on the patio between
two bamboo thickets and facing
the creek, all that I hear while
staring down at the unforgiving paper
is chatter and song,
the crisp fluff of birds flying
back and forth to the feeders,
the creek that actually burbles,
and the nearly imperceptible sound
of the sky straining to keep
us on earth despite our disappointments,
our fatal cries that disappear
into her blueness, her blackness.
MARCH IN PATAGONIA, AZ
Some days in March are dark
and some altogether too glittery
and loud with birds. There is recent news
of ancient cosmic events that have lost
significance. I recognize the current
moon from Granada several years
ago, a big Spanish moon though here
it hangs over Mexico, shining on blood
and the music wandering lost in the air.
At the ranch starving cattle
bawl loudly in the drought.
BRAZIL
“It rains most in the ocean off Trinidad
so that the invisible sea flowers
never stop blooming on the lid of water.”
Or so she said on a balcony in Bahia
in 1982, brushing her long black hair
upward into the wet moonlit night.
I’m staring east at the island of Itaparica
spangled with light a dozen miles at sea.
I think that it’s not for me to determine the truth.
A half hour ago it was a snake far to the west
in the jungle which only ate flowers the color
of blood and laid seven red eggs every year.
In Brazil I’m adding to my knowledge
of the impossible. In her remote hometown
a condor stole and raised a child as its own.
At dinner of a roasted fish she said the child
had learned to fly and I broke, saying no,
that our arms have the wrong kind of feathers.
She was pissed and said, “I went to Miami
with an aunt when I was seven to fix my heart.
You only make guns, bombs, cars, and count money.
“Your ocean stank of gasoline, your food was white.
I saw an alligator eat a dog. A river
didn’t run into the sea but went backwards.
“A century ago in my hometown the Virgin Mary
appeared and sang about her lost child in the river
of men. If you don’t believe me you’re wicked.”
Back home in the cold our dogs run across
clear ice, their feet and shadows watched by fish.
I drop three lighted candles into moving water to survive Brazil.
GRAND MARAIS
The wind came up so strongly at midnight
the cabin creaked in its joints and between
the logs, the tin roof hummed and shuddered
and in the woods you could hear the dead
trees called widow-makers falling
with staccato crashes, and by 3 a.m.
the thunderous roar of Lake Superior miles away.
My dog Rose comes from the sofa
where she invariably sleeps.
Her face is close
to mine in the dark, a question on her breath.
Will the sun rise again? She gets on the bed trembling.
I wonder what the creature life is doing
without shelter? Rose is terribly frightened
of this lordly old bear I know who visits
the yard for the sunflower seeds I put out
for the birds. I placed my hand on his head one night
through the car window when I was drunk.
He doesn’t give a shit about violent storms
knowing the light comes from his mind, not the sun.
DESERT SNOW
I don’t know what happens after death
but I’ll have to chance it. I’ve been waking
at 5 a.m. and making a full study of darkness.
I was upset not hearing the predicted rain
that I very much need for my wildflowers.
At first light I see that it was the silent rain
of snow. I didn’t hear this softest sigh
of windless snow softly falling
here on the Mexican border in the mountains,
snow in a white landscape of high desert.
The birds are confounded by this rare snow
so I go out with a spatula to clean the feeders,
turn on the radio not to the world’s wretched news
but to the hot, primary colors of cantina music,
the warbles and shrieks of love, laughter, and bullets.
REALITY
Nothing to console the morning but the dried grasshopper
on my desk who fell apart at my powerful touch.
Two days ago at dawn I awoke with a large black tear
stuck to my cheek that felt like a globule of tar.
The MRI machine at the Nogales hospital revealed
that the black tear is connected to heart, brain, penis
with three pieces of nearly invisible spiderweb.
My friend the urologist said that if even one breaks
Eros is dead in my body, a corpse of the memory of love.
Luckily I was diverted for a day by helping my wife
make Thanksgiving dinner for ten friends and neighbors,
brooding about the souls of 35 million turkeys
hovering visibly in the blue sky above our naked earth.
They can’t fly away like the game birds I hunt, doves and quail.
As with people we’ve bred them so that they’re unable to escape.
At certain remote locations they see through the fence
their mysterious cousins flying to tree limbs
and weep dry turkey tears of bitter envy.
I made the gravy, the most important substance on earth,
but now on Friday morning I’m back to my black tear
on my old brown cheek of barely alive Eros.
In slightly more than a week I’ll be seventy-two.
How can I concoct this intricate fantasy of making love
to three French girls on a single Paris afternoon?
It begins with a not very good pot of coffee
in my room at the Hôtel de Suède on rue Vaneau
where at night I heard an owl, a chouette in the garden.
I meet two of the girls in the Luxembourg on a morning walk
where one, astoundingly, is reading a novel I wrote.
I demand ID to make sure they’re of legal age.
One must be safe from the police in fantasies.
We go shopping and I buy them 100-euro
tricornered hats. We go to an apartment
and meet the older sister of one. She’s twenty-three.
I sign my books they own and when I turn
they sit on the sofa with soft cotton skirts raised.
I forgot to add that it’s a warm day in April.
Should I choose by saying, “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,”
or would this Michigan idiom frighten them?
I make a dream swan dive into a day of love and laughter
then suddenly I’m back at Hard Luck Ranch
giving the cow dogs biscuits. Old nitwit Petey
pisses in his food and water as Man in Our Time.
I am liberated back into the fragility of childhood.
SHE
Nothing is as it appears to be.
What is this aging? What am I to make
of these pale, brutal numbers? For a moment I’m fourteen.
The sky didn’t fall in, it fell out.
Men suck on their sugary black pistols
but the world isn’t ruled for a second.
The pen is mightier than the sword
only in the fretwork of a poet’s language.
At fourteen green was green and women
were the unreachable birds of night,
their fronts and backs telling us
we might not be alone in the universe,
their voices singing that the earth is female.
The humid summer night was as warm as birth,
and she swam out into the night beyond the dock light.
LOVE
Love is raw as freshly cut meat,
mean as a beetle on the track of dung.
It is the Celtic dog that ate its tail in a dream.
It chooses us as a blizzard chooses a mountain.
It’s seven knocks on the door you pray not to answer.
The boy followed the girl to school eating his heart
with each step. He wished to dance with her
beside a lake, the wind showing the leaves’
silvery undersides. She held the moist bouquet
of wild violets he had picked against her neck.
She wore the sun like her skin
but beneath, her blood was black as soil.
At the grave of her dog in the woods
she told him to please go away forever.
BACK INTO MEMORY
The tears roll up my cheek
and the car backs itself south.
I pull away from the girl and reverse
through the door without looking.
In defiance of the body the mind
does as it wishes, the crushed bones
of life reknit themselves in sunlight.
In the night the body melts itself
down to the void before birth
before you swam the river into being.
Death takes care of itself like a lightning
stroke and the following thunder
is the veil being rent in twain.
The will to live can pass away
like that raven colliding with the sun.
In age we tilt toward home.
We want to sleep a long time, not forever,
but then to sleep a long time becomes forever.
DEBTORS
They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?
PRISONERS
In truth I have lost my beauty
but this isn’t as important as the violation
of the myth of t
he last meal due those
about to be executed. I believe in the sacred
obligation to give a man about to be dead
what he wants to eat. Not true. In Texas
it’s limited to what’s on hand, the hundreds
of tons of frozen garbage prisoners feed on.
Not to worry. I’m ineligible to be executed,
not being convicted of killing anyone, but after
a lifetime of chewing I’d choose a saltine cracker.
After all, we chew and chew and chew. Pigs, fish,
melancholy cows and gamboling lambs pass
through us, not to speak of fields of wheat
and lettuce, tomatoes and beans. Our jaws are strong
as a woman’s thighs pumping up the stairs
of a tall building to throw herself from the roof
because she’s tired of chewing, being penetrated
by swallowing, and of a man who chews
as if his life depended on it, which it does.
CORRUPTION
Like Afghanistan I’m full of corruption.
My friend McGuane once said, “I’d gladly
commit a hundred acts of literary capitulation
to keep my dog in Alpo.” The little ones needed
dental braces and flutes, cars and houses.
Off and on I’ve had this dangerous golden touch
like a key to a slot machine streaming 20-dollar
gold pieces. It was so easy to buy expensive
French wine that purges the grim melancholy
of livelihood, the drudgery of concocting fibs.
I know a man, happily married, who bought
a girl a hundred-dollar pair of panties. I was stunned.
For this price I buy a whole lamb each fall.
Now lamb and panties are gone though the panties
might be on a card table at a yard sale.