by Jim Harrison
The violent wind.
The violent wind.
On watch on the ship’s stern.
The past disappears
with the ship’s wake
and the furling dark waters.
A local girl walked over the top
of the Absaroka Mountain Range
and was never seen again. Some say
a grizzly bear got her, some say aliens,
I think that fueled by loneliness
she is still walking.
One day a heron walked
up our front steps and looked
into the front-door window.
Was it a heron and also
something else?
Years ago at the cabin when returning
from the saloon at night
I’d scratch the ears of a bear
who’d rest his chin on the car windowsill.
Azure. All told a year of water.
Some places with no bottom.
I had hoped to understand it
but it wasn’t possible. Fish.
She told me in white tennis shorts
that when you think you can’t
take it anymore you’re just getting started.
No pieces can be put back together.
Last week in this pasture it was 75.
Today it’s 29 and snowing. The world is too small
with a limited amount of weather
with no cosmic 15,000-mph winds.
A piece of luck!
These birds. Cutting up often dreary
life and letting joy seep through.
What are they? It’s not for me to know
but to sense, to feel flight and song,
even in today’s gray snowy sky.
Why does the mind compose this music
well before the words occur? The gods
created the sun and we the lightbulb
and the medicine that kept the happy child alive.
Some of my friends sought their deathbeds,
Celtic dogs with their death tails
in their teeth. I thought I knew
them but I didn’t. They ignored birds.
Late October and now I wear a wool
cap around the clock, take three naps a day.
I’ve no clear memory why this happens,
something about the earth tilting on an axis.
Yesterday twenty-three sandhill cranes flew north. Why?
I pray for seven women I know
who have cancer. I can’t tell you why
they have cancer and neither can doctors.
They are beaten by a stranger with no face.
Recently ghosts are more solid than we are,
they have color and meat on their bones,
even odor and voices. You can only tell them
by what’s missing. A nose, ear, feet on backward,
their hair that floats though the air is still.
We fear the small hole in our brain
that made its tubular descent to the center of the earth
when we were born. In the loveliest landscape,
the tinge of death. The photo of the mammoth grizzly
gaining on the young buffalo? No, the tinge is in the air.
Fifty years ago in our cold, snowbound
house in the north, Carlos Montoya brought sunlight.
When I finally went to Seville and Granada,
the cold house sometimes entered my hotel rooms,
a flash of snowdrifts among the orange trees.
Off Ecuador the whale was so close I could smell
her oily smell, look into a soccer-ball eye.
I was frightened when the motor quit
and I couldn’t see land. Now I can’t see
the ocean in the mountains, only watch the rivers run.
After a long siege of work
I wake up to a different world.
I’m older of course, but colors and shapes
have changed. The mountains have moved a bit,
our children are older. How could this happen?
When young I read that during the Philippine War
we shot six hundred Indians in a wide pit. It didn’t seem fair.
During my entire life I’ve been helpless
in this matter. I even dream about it.
I read so much that my single eye became hot
as if it had been staring into nebulae.
Of course it had. On some clear nights in the country
the stars can exhaust us. They only mean what they are.
In summer I walk the dogs at dawn
before the rattlesnakes awake. In cold weather
I walk the dogs at dawn out of habit.
In the pastures we find many oval deer beds
of crushed grass. Their bodies are their homes.
The tree only intends what it is with its dictator
genome. Like us they don’t see what’s coming.
They often rot from inside out though it can take
decades. When sawed down you smell the sharp
edged ripeness of their lives, their blood.
The clouds are only a foot above my head
and there’s a brisk cold wind from the north.
Still, when I pass the yard headed for the hills
the garden is lavish with dying and dead
flowers, so many wild immutable colors
that my cold head soars up through the clouds.
Out in the pasture I found the second concealed
hole descending to a room sculpted from hard dirt.
The previous owner was frightened of atomic attack.
Now it’s the home of the beast god forgot to invent.
This is where our bodies will sit down to eat us.
On television I saw a tall willowy girl jump
seven feet in the air. How grand to have a dozen
of these girls weaving in and out of the pines
and willows in the yard and jumping so high,
perhaps to Stravinsky, the landscape visible
under their bodies. They don’t have to be nice.
Art often isn’t though it scrubs the soul fresh.
The beauty of the rattlesnake is in its threat.
As the Bulgarians say, the moon is to blame.
Come to think of it that’s right. The moon
works in waves of power like the ocean
and I was swept away into wrongdoing
when the moon was large. I am innocent.
Of late I can wake up and the world
isn’t quite recognizable or I’m finally
with age losing my touch, my control.
Three days seemed identical but then they were
and perhaps in losing my self all became lucid.
This isn’t a brave new world but one finally revealed.
The brush I scrub my soul with each morning
is made of the ear-hairs of a number of animals:
dogs, pigs, deer, goat, raccoon, a wolverine,
and pinfeathers of particular birds, a secret.
Brush too hard, your ambitions will be punished.
I took the girl to the dance but she returned
with another. I forgave her. I took her to another
dance and she went home with two men. I forgave
her again. This became a pattern, I forgave
her so the maggots of hatred wouldn’t eat my brain.
The night is long for a hungry dog.
We’re not with them in spirit. They’re alone.
The small teddy bear Lulu gave me in France
suddenly tipped over on my desk. Does this mean
my beloved is dead? She’s ninety-three. Her
food and wine were the essence of earth.
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
and mountains of the Mexican border
I’ve followed the calls of birds
that don’t exist into thickets
and u
p canyons. I’m unsure
if all of me returned.
I left this mangy little
three-legged bear two big fish
on a stump. He ate them at night
and at dawn slept like a god
leaning against the stump
in a chorus of birds.
The day was so dulcet and beautiful
I could think about nothing.
I lost my head.
A big warm wind in November,
yellow willow leaves
swirl around one hundred
white sheep.
This world is going to sleep.
Woke up from a nap and in an instant
knew I was alive. It was startling
to the point of fear. Emotions and sensations
were drowning me. This had never happened before.
On a blue chair in a pasture I relearned the world.
I’ve heard it three times from the woods,
le cri de Merlin. Fear is the price
you pay for remoteness, pure fear, somber
and penetrating. Maybe it’s just that female wolf
I saw. The world is not what we thought it was.
In the Yucatán the jungle was from the movies
until the second day, then became itself.
I go away then come home but the jungle’s
birds and snakes are with me in the snow.
You carry with you all the places you’ve ever been.
In a foreign city, even New York, I’m never
convinced I’ll get back home where I wish to be.
It seems unlikely. The routes disappear.
You can follow the birds home but they’re too fast
and often change their minds. Especially crows.
Reading Gilfillan’s Warbler Road I learn
what I don’t care about anymore by its absence.
These tiny birds are the living jewelry of the gods.
They clothe my life in proper mystery telling me
that all is not lost, harboring as they do stillborn children.
I’m quite tired of beating myself up
to write. I think I’ll start letting
the words slip out like a tired child.
“Can I have a piece of pie” he asks,
and then he’s asleep back on the cusp of the moon.
Again I wonder if I’ll return.
France twice this fall, then New York. Will I know
if I don’t return? The basic question of life.
Does Robert Frost know he’s dead? His Yankee wit
a dust mote. God’s stories last until no one hears.
The fly on the window is not a distant crow
in the sky. We’re forced into these decisions.
People are forever marrying the wrong people
and the children of the world suffer.
Their dreams hang in the skies out of reach.
There’s no question about circles, curves,
and loops, life’s true structures, but the edges,
straight lines, squares come from us.
We must flee these shapes, even linear sentences
that limit us to doors, up and down ladders,
straight trajectories which will curve in eternity.
In Africa back in 1972 one day I studied
a female lion with blood on her fluttering whiskers,
traces of dark blood on her muzzle. A creature died
as we all must. In my seventies I see the invisible
lion not stalking but simply waiting, the solution
of the mystery I don’t want to solve. She’s waiting.
One day near here there was an earthquake
that started a new river in the mountains. During
the ponderous snowmelt in spring the river
is hundreds of feet deep and massive boulders roll
crashing along the bottom though you can’t see them.
I’ve traveled back to the invention of trees
but never water. Water is too far in the blind past
whereas trees have eyes that help us see
their penetration of earth. Much that you see
isn’t with your eyes. Throughout the body are eyes.
Of course we are condemned to life without parole
until the gods usher us in to our executioners
who live in a hot windowless room, always dark.
But then our fragility imagines everything
and the final moment is a kiss from the lipless gods.
Years before Hubble I thrust myself
far up into the night and saw that the constellations
were wildly colored. This frightened me
so I swam a river at night waiting for the stars
to resume their whiteness to adapt to my limits.
Years before Hubble I thrust myself
far up into the night and saw that the constellations
were wildly colored. This frightened me
so I swam a river at night waiting for the stars
to resume their whiteness to adapt to my limits.
In Fillmore, Utah, night of the full moon,
Nov. 20, a day of blizzard, driving rain,
at 4:44 a.m. I’m arranging my tiny petrified
truffles from the Dordogne on the motel table.
They look like the decayed teeth of a small predator.
I’ll leave one behind to start a new civilization.
The birds of winter. How I brooded
about them in my childhood. Why not fly south?
In the kingdom of birds everyone lives until they don’t.
It’s sudden. The chickadee hanging on a barb
of wire half eaten by the northern shrike. Birds kill
each other like we do but to eat. We’re both five billion.
Whoever destroys their home rapes the gods.
The body wins another little argument
with doom. You wake to a crisp, clear morning
and you’re definitely not dead. The golden light
flows down the mountain across the creek. A little vodka
and twelve hours of sleep. Nature detonates your mind
with the incalculable freshness of the new day.
The creek bed in front of our casita
has many tracks: javelina, deer, mountain
lion, and sometimes in the sand the serpentine
trace of a fat rattler. Foremost I love
the tracks left by hundreds of species of birds
that remain in the air like we do.
What vices we can hold in our Big Heads
and Big Minds, our Humor and Humility.
We don’t march toward death, it marches toward us
as a summer thunderstorm came slowly across
the lake long ago. See the lightning of mortality dance,
the black clouds whirling as if a million crows.
Doom should be ashamed of itself.
It’s so ordinary happening to billions
of creatures. It’s common as a toilet seat,
the discarded shoes of a lifetime. It’s proper
that it often hides itself until the last moment
and then the eternal silent music begins.
I’m unaware of what kind of singer I’ve become.
Each night there’s a glass of vodka that quickly
becomes the color of my blood, the color of the guts
of archangels, the color pumped in dirt by the hearts
of soldiers. Any more than one glass of vodka
smears the constellations, the true source of light.
In my final moment I’ll sing a nonsense ditty
of reconciliation knowing that music came
before words. I’m only a painter in Lascaux.
I’ve sold my destiny for a simple quarter that bought
me the world that I’ve visited at twilight.
I will sing even with my tongue sliced<
br />
into a fork. At the hospital this morning
I learned I’ll be a nursemaid forever
or exactly as long as forever lasts. I study birds
that give me the tentative spaciousness of flight.
About the Author
Jim Harrison, one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers, is the author of thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—including Legends of the Fall, the acclaimed trilogy of novellas, and The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, and in 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With a fondness for open space and anonymous thickets, he divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.
Books by Jim Harrison
POETRY COLLECTIONS
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer and Ghazals
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected and New Poems: 1961-1981
The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Ikkyū
The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems