Copyright © 2018, Edward Harkness
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-912887-71-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-912887-77-7
Library of Congress Control Number
2018938190
Front and back cover art: Doris Harkness
Design: Lauren Grosskopf & Ed Harkness
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PLEASURE BOAT STUDIO: A LITERARY PRESS
www.pleasureboatstudio.com
Seattle, Washington
Contact Lauren Grosskopf, Publisher
Email: [email protected]
Also by Edward Harkness
Saying the Necessary
Beautiful Passing Lives
Ice Children, a chapbook
Syringa in Twilight, a chapbook
Watercolor Painting of a Bamboo Rake, a chapbook
Fiddle Wrapped in a Gunnysack, a chapbook
The Law of the
Unforeseen
Poems by
Edward Harkness
PLEASURE BOAT STUDIO:
A LITERARY PRESS
CONTENTS
Blank Page
One: Great Apes at the Zoo
Three Italian Prunes
Coming to Terms with the Fact that I May Never Get the Hang of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Monday Morning Blues”
Clearing Brush
Catching the Vase
America, Great Once Again
Scene Along the Drive
Great Apes at the Zoo
Two: The Gods
Ice Children of the Andes
Icebergs Near Twillingate
To the Woman at the March
Honeymoon
The Gods
There’s Nothing Left to Say
The House of Mystery
“Barb’s Healing Hands”
Three: Ash
The Return
The Twins
Dahlias
Blue Hydrangea
Ax
Potatoes
My Father Mows the Lawn
Tying a Tie
Root Beer Float
Newcomer
Shell
Immigrants
View of Richmond Beach
Ash
Coffee
Four: Presence
The Path
Poetry Class
The Lesson
Spoon
Dear Friend
Letter to J, Two Days After Her Death
Pine Siskin
Chickadees at the Feeder
New Year’s Eve
Presence
Facebook
Neighborhood Crows
Washing Our Backs
Five: Airborne
Swing
Meadowlark
Bat in Daylight
The Unfocused Eyes of Drones
Whitman Reading by Moonlight
Airborne
Girls Jumping Rope
Six: Union Creek in Winter
Union Creek in Winter
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For Linda, Devin and Ned Harkness,
for my mother, Doris Harkness,
and in memory my father, Harry Harkness (1925-2010)
BLANK PAGE
Face it. You’re locked in a barless cage.
Each way out goes back in,
like a Möbius strip or Escher staircase.
It’s only paper, after all, a planless
floor plan, a plane not quite spatial,
not exactly a hotel room in Rome
where something surprising might occur—
a meeting, say, with a tour guide
who will explain in the lilting music
of an Italian accent your itinerary
through the city’s ancient streets.
She’ll point out ruins, bazaars along the Tiber,
lovers at night dangling their ankles
in Trevi Fountain, and then treat you
to a glass of local red at a table
in Campo de’ Fiori, there to hear
the bells from distant St. Peter’s,
to watch the throngs of tourists,
to study the night sky. Far better this
than to stand in line by yourself
on the slippery Italian marble floor
of the blank page, its empty cathedral
echoing all the things you might have said
to break the silence of your life.
You’re not in Rome any more. You’re home,
starting from scratch, pacing again
the corridors of the blank page,
imagining a chair, a table, a vase of cosmos
inviting you to sit, to consider how small
the universe is, how simple, how patiently
it waits for you to add to it—whatever
you care to add—stars, waterfalls,
the names of those you loved, those
you didn’t love enough. Even the blank
page belongs on the blank page,
always empty, always full of promise.
One: Great Apes at the Zoo
Oh, when they heard that Louis was dead,
All the people, they dressed in red.
The angels laid him away.
~From the song “Louis Collins,” by Mississippi John Hurt
THREE ITALIAN PRUNES
roll off my desk at work, and of course
I must ponder this inconsequential event,
as if adhering to it grants it eternal life,
and damn, they’re bruised and bleeding now
in my hand. I look at them as Newton did
his famous apple, also bruised, no doubt,
but a bruise that led to the glue of the universe,
a world that pulls us toward its heart,
which is good and bad, good in that
we don’t float through life as anemones do
in the starless deeps. Bad in that we’re magnetized,
tethered to the three dimensions,
always feeling about for the fourth or fifth
key ring to the beyond. I pick a scab
of purple prune skin from my teeth.
In truth, there are no dimensions.
There’s merely now, my cluttered desk
with its pens and sandwich wrappers,
and an 1886 edition of Berens’ Hand-Book
of Mythology: Myths and Legends of Greece and Rome,
in remarkably good condition considering its age,
owned once upon a time by a young scholar.
On the inside cover she has floridly fountain-penned
her name, Amelia, notes she’s 17, boarding
at something-or-other academy in Charleston.
She likes Athene, has scrawled “Athene” here and twice
on the secret back inside cover. Amelia has,
I discover, underlined a passage: “Pallas-Athene,
goddess of Wisdom and Armed Resistance....
is the only divinity whose authority was equal
to that of her father, Zeus himself.”
As for the prunes, I ate them, they were delicious,
so sweet and so cold. As for Berens, he writes
with the clarity of the stream into which Narcissus gazed.
As for Amelia, her secret is an open book.
She’s fallen hard for the goddess of Wisdo
m
and Armed Resistance, the two of them
now married to the scintillant dust of eternity.
~With apologies to WC Williams and EM Behrens
COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FACT THAT I MAY NEVER GET THE HANG OF MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT’S “MONDAY MORNING BLUES”
I said it and life goes on.
It’s not just the complicated 6/8 time,
or the continuous alternating bass.
And it’s not the smooth-as-a-baby’s-butt
slides from the 3rd fret to the 5th,
and the instantaneous requirement
of the left-hand fingers that they leap
from the barred A-chord to the 5th fret D,
or the two-step dance of the right thumb
thumping the thick baritone E-string,
or even the jump back to A and a rather
eccentric little duet you do
with your left pinky and ring finger
to make an A-sharp major diminished,
or whatever in God’s name Hurt does there
to resolve the dissonance and settle back
into the barred A. Nor would I say
it’s the slurring of certain notes,
the hammer-offs and hammer-ons
scattered variously throughout the ragged
bluesy but up-tempo wizardry on the 1965
recording I have, now so scratched
as to be almost unplayable. And it’s not as if
my no-longer-nimble fingers
refuse to hop and skip gymnastically
up and down the fret board, as they once did.
It’s the damn song—that’s what trips me.
It’s the blues of Monday morning,
you feel around for your shoes—gone—
and you realize you’re in jail,
you don’t know why, nobody does—
in jail, you realize, for six long weeks today,
so goes the song. Tomorrow’s your trial day.
What might be my fine, you’re wondering.
Can’t be too much, can it?
Then the trial, you’ve played the song
over and over, nobody cares how many hours
you’ve put in, you yourself don’t care,
you just like to play, but the jury says guilty,
the judge says Get a pick and shovel,
let’s go down in the mine. That’s the only time,
that’s the only time, that’s the only time,
you ever felt like crying. Mister,
change a dollar and give me a lucky dime.
Jail or mine—there’s no escape, none,
except by playing again and again
Hurt’s simple, wickedly difficult tune
with your forever tender fingertips
raw from pressing the steel wires—
except by singing your way,
no matter how badly,
through the secret air duct of music.
CLEARING BRUSH
I’d fallen asleep in the snow. Waking,
a thin coverlet slid off my poncho.
There lay the handle of my machete,
long as my forearm, its dented blue blade
already stained with rust, blade and forearm
put to the test that winter to clear brush.
I rose and re-entered my sodden life,
the one I’d just left, the one on a bluff
above the beach where on clear days you’d see
the blue Olympic Range across the Sound.
If the tide was slack, the Sound flat as glass,
you’d see, far out, the dark backs of orcas
rise and fall, the blades of their dorsal fins
knifing through the swells. No clear view that day.
No mountains. All horizons hemmed by snow,
a wet smattering on the boughs of firs
and alders along the cliff
of seldom-visited Alder Park.
Our job: to whack scotch broom, a buck an hour,
paid in cash by a cadaverous park
supervisor, Basil, who never spoke,
merely nodded and appeared not to breathe.
My workmate, Walter—aka “Waltzer”—
McCann, claimed title to a Cadillac,
a decrepit thing, once green, now the grey
of waste-water. An oily knotted rope
held the passenger door forever closed.
No window. In the predawn he’d honk twice,
beckon me to crawl in, a 5-minute
endeavor, lunch bucket first, then to hunch
on a mush of newspapers that did not
well cover the seat springs. He’d creep
the long way to the park, as if giving
a guided tour of cheap motels, car lots,
mini-marts along Aurora, always
taking the detour to pass Golden View
Cemetery, rolling down his window
to call out “Good morning, darling”
to Delores, his wife, asleep among maples.
Six hours a day we’d swing our machetes,
the blades ringing when they bit the wrist-sized
trunks of broom and dogwood. By March,
we’d slashed and piled a mountain of brush
just as snow began to fall, lacing our ugly heap
into a thing of delicate beauty.
After lunch, shoulder squealing, I lay next
to the pile, using a red bandanna to shield
my eyes from the pricks of wet snow.
The nap was a white cradle of silence,
broken by the Cadillac’s throaty growl.
I never understood why we were there,
Waltzer and me, clearing the bluff of brush.
Brushing off my poncho, blinking away
the icy splats, all I knew is that I’d been reborn—
not into the radiance of paradise,
but close enough—a white newness
to everything, a cloud of blue exhaust,
a furious choir of sparrows from within our pile,
and the rattling emphysemic rasp of Waltzer McCann
calling to me to clamber through the window,
asking would I be so kind as to spot him a Big Mac,
large fries and Diet Coke on the way home.
CATCHING THE VASE
Twice now, reaching for something—a light switch
that first time—you’ve caught the ceramic
Chinese vase before it went to pieces. This morning,
your sleeve snagged the lid stem just enough
to cause the vase to teeter and topple
off the end table. You dove in a way
you didn’t know your body could move
except during sex. Your heart became
an instant rose, your head struck the edge
of the table, your foot kicked out like a third
hand clawing at the throat of death, caught the vase
soccer-style with a socked instep and held it
for the quarter-second your hands needed
to make the grab. You averted that disaster,
bandaged your forehead and noticed once again
the three goats painted on the urn’s globed face—
one white, one black, one brown—all three browsing
beneath a leafy tree. You always thought the urn
an ungainly melon, hardly pristine,
its rim chipped, the lid broken and repaired—
less antiquity and more thrift store—
very likely a water jar, neither rare
nor old, or, that is, not old for the broad river
of Chinese history, or the broader river
of its pottery. Late Qing Dynasty, maybe,
early eighteen hundred-something, bought
on the cheap at a “ghost market” in Tianjin.
Still, you love those ugly goats, the misshapen tree,
and the plum-colored sun
perched oddly
in one of its limbs. You saved the day this time.
The third time, all charms will end. The goats
will turn to shards on the hardwood floor.
You picture yourself sweeping, grieving,
sifting the remains into a trash bag.
Your eyes lie, seeing things not there, not seeing
things that are, not seeing the goats as homely,
funny, frolicking like real goats,
not seeing the plum sun as precisely placed
by the artisan, not seeing the scarred
lopsided tree as a Daoist poke
at Confucian harmony, and only now
seeing for the first time the stream
sluicing down a hinted-at hill from behind
and to the right of the tree, curlicues of water
curling over hinted-at rocks in calm blue curves.
The stream has no source. The black goat,
leaf in mouth, studies you with an animal’s bland
curiosity. There’ll be no third lucky catch. One day,
you—or someone—will dive and miss. You love
the goats because they’re there, because the plum sun
climbs the limb forever, or at least for now.
AMERICA, GREAT ONCE AGAIN
Riot cops have slammed the woman with green streaks
in her dark hair onto the airport’s marble floor.
I count eight from the posted video, whose eye peeks
blinking between protesters near a glass door.
She sobs, cries out, “Stop! You’re hurting me!”
The eye moves to show a girl’s head. She’s ten,
I’d guess. Cornrows, hands over ears—that’s all I see,
all I need to see, must always see—men
in body armor, one boot on the woman’s back,
one on her neck, while others tie her wrists,
twisting them till she shrieks, her body slack
from writhing against what it resists.
The recorder, as her video blurs and ends,
whispers in her phone, We’re so fucked, my friends.
The Law of the Unforeseen Page 1
