by Jim Harrison
Right now a wind has come up and there’s a strange
blizzard of willow buds outside my studio.
I’m on death row but won’t give up corruption.
I’ve waterboarded myself. I’m guilty of everything.
OUR ANNIVERSARY
I want to go back to that wretched old farm
on a cold November morning eating herring
on the oil tablecloth at daylight, the hard butter
in slivers and chunks on rye bread, gold-colored
homemade butter. Fill the woodbox, Jimmy.
Clots of cream in the coffee, hiss and crackle
of woodstove. Outside it’s been the hardest freeze
yet but the heels still break through into the earth.
A winter farm is dead and you want to head for the woods.
In the barn the smell of manure and still-green hay
hit the nose with the milk in the metal pails.
Grandpa is on the last of seven cows,
tugging their dicklike udders, a squirt in the mouth
for the barn cat. My girlfriend loves another
and at twelve it’s as if all the trees have died.
Sixty years later seven hummingbirds at the feeder,
miniature cows in their stanchions sipping liquid sugar.
We are fifty years together. There are still trees.
DOORS
I’m trying to create an option for all
these doors in life. You’re inside
or out, outside or in. Of late, doors
have failed us more than the two-party system
or marriages comprising only one person.
We’ve been fooled into thousands of dualisms
which the Buddha says is a bad idea.
Nature has portals rather than doors.
There are two vast cottonwoods near a creek
and when I walk between them I shiver.
Winding through my field of seventy-seven
large white pine stumps from about 1903
I take various paths depending on spirit.
The sky is a door never closed to us.
The sun and moon aren’t doorknobs.
Dersu Uzala slept outside for forty-five years.
When he finally moved inside he died.
GREED
I’m greedy for the pack rat to make
it across the swift creek. It’s my first swimming
pack rat and I wonder why he wants the other side.
The scent of a pack-rat woman perhaps.
I’m greedy for those I prayed for to survive
cancer, greedy for money we don’t need,
for the freshest fish to eat every day
without moving to the ocean’s shore,
to have many lovers who don’t ruin my marriage
and that my dog will live longer than me
to avoid the usual sharp boyhood heartbreak,
to regain the inch and a half I lost with age, to see
my youngest aunt pull up her nylons again in 1948.
Oh how I wanted a real sponge, a once-living
creature, and a wide chamois cloth to wash
cars for a quarter, a huge twenty-cent burger
and a five-cent Coca-Cola for lunch, greedy
that my beloved wife will last longer than me,
that the wind will blow harder up the girl’s
summer dress, for three dozen oysters
and a bottle of 1985 Pétrus at twilight,
to smoke a cigarette again in a bar, that my
daughters live to be a hundred if they so wish,
that I march to heaven barefoot on a spring morning.
CEREAL
Late-night herring binge causes sour
gut. My dog ate the Hungarian partridge
eggs in the tall grass, her jaws dripping
yolk, therefore I ate a cereal for breakfast
guaranteed to restore my problematic health.
Soon enough I’ll be diving for my own
herring in the North Atlantic, or running so fast
I nearly take off like the partridge mother
abandoning her eggs to the canine monster.
It will be strange to be physically magnificent
at my age, the crowds of girls cooing
around me as I bounce up and down
as if my legs cannot contain their pogo strength,
but I leave the girls behind, bouncing across
a river toward the end of the only map we have,
the not very wide map of the known world.
D.B.
A winter dawn in New York City
with people rushing to work
eating rolls, drinking paper cups
of coffee. This isn’t the march of the dead
but people moving toward their livelihoods
in this grim, cold first sign of daylight.
I watched the same thing in Paris
and felt like the eternal meddler sitting
at the window, trying to avoid
conclusions about humans, their need
to earn their daily bread, as we used to say.
In Paris I know a lovely woman
who wears a twenty-foot-long wool skirt
to hide her legs from men. Who can blame
her though I fear the grave dangers
of this trailing garment clipped and woven
from lowly sheep. What a burden
it is to drag this heavy skirt
throughout the workday to hide from desire
as if her sexuality had become a car bomb
rather than a secret housepet hidden
from the landlords of the world who are always there.
SUNLIGHT
After days of darkness I didn’t understand
a second of yellow sunlight
here and gone through a hole in clouds
as quickly as a flashbulb, an immense
memory of a moment of grace withdrawn.
It is said that we are here but seconds in cosmic
time, twelve and a half billion years,
but who is saying this and why?
In the Salt Lake City airport eight out of ten
were fiddling relentlessly with cell phones.
The world is too grand to reshape with babble.
Outside the hot sun beat down on clumsy metal
birds and an actual ten-million-year-old
crow flew by squawking in bemusement.
We’re doubtless as old as our mothers, thousands
of generations waiting for the sunlight.
BRUTISH
The man eating lamb’s tongue salad
rarely thinks of the lamb.
The oral surgeon jerking twenty teeth out
in a day still makes marinara sauce.
The German sorting baby shoes at Treblinka
writes his wife and children frequently.
The woman loves her husband, drops two kids
at day care, makes passionate love
to an old boyfriend at the Best Western.
We are parts. What part are you now?
The shit of the world has to be taken
care of every day. You have to choose
your part after you take care of the shit.
I’ve chosen birds and fish, the creatures
whose logic I wish to learn and live.
NIGHTFEARS
What is it that you’re afraid of at night?
Is it the gunman at the window, the rattler
slipping into your boot on the patio, the painful
quirk in your tummy or the semitruck
drifting across the centerline because the driver
is text-messaging a she-male girlfriend in El Paso?
Is it because so many birds these days are born
with one wing like poets in campus infirmaries,
that the ghouls of finance, or the post office,
h
ave taken your paycheck to pay for Kool-Aid
parties around their empty pools? The night
has decided to stick around for a week
and people are confused, we creatures of habit
who took the sun for granted. She had decided
on whim to keep herself from us, calling down
the descent of a galactic cloud, to let flowers
wilt and die. Whole countries expire in hysteria
and troops must march in the glare of headlights.
When the red sun decides to rise again we humans
of earth swim through the acrid milk of our brains
toward the rising light, a new song on our lips,
but all creatures retreat from us, their murderers.
In real dawn’s early light my poached egg is only an egg.
BLUE
During last night’s blue moon
the Great Matter and Original Mind
were as close as your skin.
In the predawn dark you ate muskmelon
and the color of the taste lit up the mind.
The first finch awoke and the moon
descended into its mountain burial.
THE CURRENT POOR
The rich are giving the poor bright-colored
balloons, a dollar a gross, also bandages,
and leftover Mercurochrome from the fifties.
It is an autumn equinox and full moon present,
an event when night and day are precisely
equal, but then the poor know that night
always wins, grows wider and longer
until Christmas when they win a few minutes.
Under the tree there’s an orange big as a basketball.
It is the exiled sun resting in its winter coolness.
MOPING
Please help me, gentle reader. I need advice.
I need to carbonate my brain
before nightfall. One more night
with this heaviness will suffocate me.
It’s probably only the terror
of particulars. Memories follow us
like earaches in childhood. I’m surrounded
by sad-eyed burros, those motel paintings
I thought were book reviewers and politicians
but no, they’re all my dead friends
who keep increasing in numbers until
it occurs to me that I might join them one day
floating out there in the anemic ether
of nothingness, but that’s not my current business.
Just for the time being my brain needs oxygen
though I’m not sure what it is, life’s puzzle
where you wake in a foreign land and the people
haven’t shown themselves but the new birds
are haunting. The mind visits these alien Egypts,
these incalculable sunrises in a new place,
these birds of appetite with nowhere to land.
CHURCH
After last night’s storm the tulip
petals are strewn across the patio
where they mortally fluttered. Only the gods
could reconnect them to their green stems
but they choose not to perform such banal
magic. Life bores deep holes in us
in hopes the nature of what we are
might sink into us without the blasphemy
of the prayer for parlor tricks. Ask the gods
to know them before you beg for favors.
The pack rat removes the petals one by one.
Now they are in a secret place, not swept away.
The death of flowers is unintentional. Who knows
if either of us will have a memory of ourselves?
If you stay up in the mountains it’s always cold
but if you come down to the world of men you suffocate
in the folds of the overripe ass of piety, the smell
of alms not flowers, the smiling beast of greed.
CHATTER
Back on the blue chair before the green studio
I’m keeping track of the outside world
rather than the inside where my brain seethes
in its usual mischief. Like many poets
I’m part blackbird and part red squirrel
and my brain chatters, shrieks, and whistles
but outside it tends to get real quiet
as if the greenery, garden, and mountains
can be put into half sleep though a female
blackbird is irritated with me. She’s protecting
her fledgling child that died last Friday.
I placed a small white peony on its body.
Meanwhile the outside is full of the stuff of life.
Inside it’s sitting there slumped with the burden
of memory and anecdotal knowledge, the birds of appetite
flitting here and there singing about sex and food,
the girl bending over with her impossible target,
or will it be foie gras or bologna and mayo?
The fish back then were larger and swam past
along with a few horses and dogs. Japanese
archers once used dogs for target practice
and that’s why we won the war. A dead friend
still chatters his squirrel chatter like the squirrel
in the TV hunting program shot in the gut,
scurrying in a circle carrying the arrow
on a narrowing route. Funerals, parties,
and voyages greet the mind without gentleness.
Outside the mother blackbird shrieks. I can’t help.
RETURN
Leaving on an exciting journey
is one thing, though most of all
I am engaged in homecoming —
the dogs, the glass of wine, a favorite
pillow that missed your head, the local
night with its familiar darkness.
The birds that ignored your absence
are singing at dawn assuring you
that all is inconceivable.
PRADO
After the ghostly Prado and in the Botanic
Gardens I tried to get in touch with Goya’s
dogs. I called and called near the tiny blue roses
but likely my language was wrong
for these ancient creatures. Maybe they
know we destroyed the good hunting
in Spain and won’t leave their paintings.
I can’t give up. My waning vision
is fairly good at seeing dog souls. I wait
listening to unknown birds, noting the best voice
comes from one small and brown.
I feel a muzzle on my hand and knee
while thinking of the Caravaggio with David
looking down at the slain Goliath. This never
happens, this slaying of the brutal monster.
We know the ones that have cursed our lives.
Franco can’t hear me talking to the ghost dog.
I was lucky that early on the birds and fish
disarmed me and the monster in my soul fled.
But where am I? Where can an animal hide?
DEATH AGAIN
Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, an
d staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.
SUITE OF UNREASON
Nearly all my life I’ve noted that some of my thinking was atavistic, primitive, totemistic. This can be disturbing to one fairly learned. In this suite I wanted to examine this phenomenon.
The moon is under suspicion.
Of what use is it?
It exudes its white smoke of light.
Her name was imponderable.
Sitting in the grass seven feet
from the lilacs she knew
she’d never have a lover.
She tends to her knitting
which is the night.
That morning the sun forgot to rise
and for a while no one noticed
except a few farmers, who shot themselves.
The girl near the Théâtre de l’Odéon
walked so swiftly
we were astonished.
The fish with the huge tumor
jumped higher than my head
from my hand when released.
The girl in the green dress
sang a wordless carol
on the yellow school bus.
The truest night of the hunter
is when like his prey
he never wakes up.
Only one cloud
is moving the wrong way
across the sky
on Sunday morning.
The girl kissed a girl,
the boy kissed a boy.
What would become of them?
The violent wind.