Selected Poems

by Harrison, Tony

  pounds with a bass and undissembled beat.

  With NASA decals, necklaces by Navajo,

  Japanese in groups come out to stare

  at the demolition that they’d felt below

  their feet, choking this chill Sunday air.

  The American Wrecking Co.’s

  repeatedly rammed iron wrecking ball

  swinging in arcs of rhythmic tos and fros

  against a scarcely-50-year-old, well-built wall

  cracks cement from criss-cross steel supports,

  and, floor by floor, once guaranteed to last

  till time needs more museums, Justice Courts,

  and enterprises space, collapses to the past.

  A red light flashes many times a minute

  on the Population Clock here in D.C.

  to show the billions the World has in it

  including those police, that black youth, me,

  and, three years ago today, reached 4.5!

  Each line of verse how many people born?

  How many of these children will survive

  crushed through the narrow end of PLENTY’s horn?

  And one red light for punished and for pitied

  the FBI displays next to the time

  flashes on whenever there’s committed

  somewhere in the States a serious crime,

  as I imagine that it flashed on when the youth

  I see handcuffed and then screeched away

  to monuments of Justice, Order, Truth,

  committed his, but what it was I couldn’t say.

  An All Souls’ pumpkin rots on someone’s porch.

  It could be PLENTY’s head, about to die,

  her cornucopia a guttering torch

  still hot enough to scorch the whole Earth dry.

  This pumpkin lantern’s gouged eyes glued

  against some unbelievably bright glare

  can’t see, as I do, that young black pursued

  then caught, the red lights hacking darkening air.

  Leaves, some like menses, some volcanic hues,

  whirl on successive wafts of hot CO

  as Constitution and Independence Avenues

  boom to the ball and chain’s destructive blow

  and, against Virginia, on Capital and Law

  each sunset-reddened window one degree

  of vast thermometers that, floor by floor,

  chart our fever up to World War Three.

  In a poem this long how many new souls born?

  How many pendulum swings of wreckers’ ball

  that throbs beneath the White House on whose lawn

  a giant vacuum’s Hoovering the Fall?

  The Heartless Art

  in memoriam S.T., died 4 April 1985

  Death is in your house, but I’m out here

  sackclothing kumquats against the forecast freeze,

  filling the hole you took two days to clear

  of briars, beercans, and bleached, barkless trees,

  with hackberry leaves, pine needles, stuff like that.

  Next spring, when you’re no longer here

  we’ll have the land grassed over and quite flat.

  When the Southern sun starts setting it sets fast.

  I’ve time to tip one more load if I run.

  Because I know this light could be your last

  I drain the day of every drop of sun.

  The barrow wheel spins round with a clock’s tick.

  I hear, three fields away, a hunter’s gun,

  you, in the silence after, being sick.

  I watched you, very weak, negotiate

  the childproof pill jar, panting to draw breath,

  and when you managed it you poured your hate

  more on the poured-out contents than on death,

  and, like Baptists uttering Beelzebub

  syllable by syllable, spat Meth-

  a-done, and there’s also the poetic rub!

  I’ve often heard my fellow poets (or those

  who write in metres something like my own

  with rhyme and rhythm, not in chopped-up prose

  and brood on man’s mortality) bemoan

  the insufficiency of rhymes for death –

  hence my syllabifying Methadone

  instead of just saying that you fought for breath.

  Maybe the main but not the only cause;

  a piece of engineering I’ll explain.

  Each syllable was followed by a pause

  for breathlessness, and scorn of drugs for pain.

  Another reason, though, was to delay

  the use of one more rhyme stored in my brain

  that, alas, I’ll have a use for any day.

  I’d stored away this rhyme when we first met.

  Knowing you crawled on hands and knees to prime

  our water pump, I’ll expiate one debt

  by finally revealing that stored rhyme

  that has the same relentlessness as death

  and comes to every one of us in time

  and comes to you this April full moon, SETH!

  In return for all those oily working parts

  you took the time and trouble to explain,

  the pump that coughs, the saw that never starts,

  I’ll show you to distract you from the pain

  you feel, except when napping, all the time

  because you won’t take drugs that dull the brain,

  a bit about my metre, line and rhyme.

  In Arthur Symons’ St Teresa Nazaréth

  is stressed on the last against its spoken flow

  to engineer the contrast Jesus/Death.

  Do I endorse that contrast? I don’t, no!

  To have a life on Earth and then want Heaven

  seems like that all-night bar sign down below

  that says that Happy Hour’s from 4 to 7.

  Package lounges are like ambulances:

  the Bourbon-bibber stares at us and glowers

  at what he thinks are pained or pitying glances.

  We don’t see his face but he sees ours.

  The non-dying don’t see you but you see them

  passing by to other rooms with flowers

  as you fill the shining kidney with red phlegm.

  I’ve left some space ( )1

  benumbed by morphia and Methadone

  until the ( )2 of April, ( )3

  When I began these lines could I have known

  that the nurse’s registration of the time

  you let your spirit go with one last groan

  would help complete the first and third line rhyme?

  Those bits I added later. Them apart

  I wrote this in memoriam for Seth,

  meant to show him something of my art,

  almost a whole week before his death.

  The last thing the dying want to read,

  I thought, ’s a poem, and didn’t show it,

  and you, not dying yet, why should you need

  to know the final failure of the poet?

  The Lords of Life

  The snake our cracker neighbour had to scotch

  was black and white and beautiful to watch.

  I’d watched it shift its length, stay still, sashay,

  shunting its flesh on shuffled vertebrae

  for days before, and thought of it as ‘mine’

  so long had I wondered at its pliant spine.

  My neighbour thinks it queer my sense of loss.

  He took a branch festooned with Spanish moss,

  at the cooler end of one long afternoon,

  and pestled my oaksnake’s head into a spoon

  he flourished laughing at his dogs, then slung

  the slack ladle of its life to where it hung

  snagged on a branch for buzzards till, stripped bare,

  it trailed like a Chinese kite-string in the air.

  Waal! he exclaimed, if ahda knowed you guys

  liked snakes on your land
… he turns and sighs

  at such greenhornery. I’d half a mind

  to say I’d checked the snake’s a harmless kind

  in two encyclopaedias but knew the looks

  I’d get from him for ‘talking books’. –

  There’s something fairy (I can hear him say)

  about a guy that watches snakes all goddam day!

  The wife he bullies says: O Bill, let be!

  There’s doers and there’s watchers, maybe he …

  Ain’t no doer, says he, that’s plain to see!

  I seed him sit out on their porch and read

  some goddam great Encyclopaed-

  ia, yeah, read! What does the fairy DO?

  O Bill! she says, not everyone’s like you.

  And you’d be the first man to stand up and say

  that people living in the USA

  have every right to live the way they please. –

  Yeah! But those guys look too young for retirees!

  Nothing that I did made any sense

  but I think he offered me as recompense

  for battering my snake the chance to see

  the alligators on his property.

  Each Sunday his riding mower wouldn’t stop

  till every blade of grass had had its crop,

  so that the bald, burned earth showed through the green

  but any snake that trespassed was soon seen.

  That was the front, but out there in the back

  he hadn’t even hacked a proper track

  down to the swampy lake, his own retreat

  kept as wild as the front part was kept neat.

  This was his wilderness, his very own

  left just as it was, rank, overgrown,

  and into this he went with guns and beer

  to wallow in his dreams of the frontier

  and shot the gators we were seeing glide

  with egrets on their backs from side to side.

  The egrets ride in threes their gator skiffs,

  Pharaohs’ sarcophagi with hieroglyphs!

  He offered me his rifle: Wanna try?

  Go for the big ones not the smaller fry!

  They’ve taken gators off the Endangered List.

  I took aim and, deliberately, missed.

  He blasted three egrets like a fairground shy

  and then the gator they were ferried by.

  Then we sat down at his fire and watched the day,

  now reddened at the edges, drain away.

  This hissing of damp logs and ringpull Bud

  drunk from the can, his seal of brotherhood

  (the sort where I’d play Abel and him Cain!)

  I can’t stand his beer but don’t complain

  as he flings them across the fire for me to catch:

  round 1: the shooting, 2: the boozing match!

  Each dead can he crushed flat and tossed aside.

  (When I was safe back home I also tried

  and found, to my great chagrin, aluminum

  crushable with pressure from one thumb!)

  We stare into his cookout and exchange

  neighbourly nothings, gators still in range.

  Liberal with his beer-cans he provokes

  his gator-watching guest with racist jokes.

  Did you know, sir, that gators only eat

  dogs and niggers, darker sortsa meat?

  But you can eat him if he won’t eat you.

  I’ll give you a gator steak to barbecue.

  (He knew that cooking’s something that I do!)

  He’d watched me cooking, and, done out of doors,

  cooking could be classed among male chores.

  His suspicions of me as some city loafer

  who couldn’t gut a mullet or stew gopher

  I tried, when I felt him watching, to dispel

  by letting him see me working, working well.

  I make sure, when he stares over, my swing’s true

  when I heave the axe like I’ve seen rednecks do,

  both hands well-balanced on the slippery haft,

  or make certain that he sees me when I waft

  the coals to a fierce glow with my straw hat,

  the grill bars spitting goat or gator fat.

  If them fireants ain’t stopped with gasoline

  you can say goodbye to every inch of green.

  They say on the TV they’ll eat their way,

  if we don’t check ’em, through the USA!

  The ‘red peril’ ’s what we call them bugs down here.

  (A hiss for those villains from his seventh beer!)

  From this house, you know, we’re near enough to see

  space launchings live. The wife watched on TV,

  then dashed outside, and saw, with her own eyes,

  ‘like a silver pen’, she said, ‘The Enterprise’,

  then rushed back for the message from the Prez

  who’d just been wounded by some nut. He says:

  We feel like giants again! Taking over space

  has made Goliaths of the human race.

  Me, I was in the rowboat, trying to relax.

  I’d gotten me some chicken, 2 or 3 6-packs

  like relaxing, and I zoomed out of a snooze

  with a sudden start, the way you do with booze,

  and saw our spaceship, clear as I see you,

  like a bullet disappearing in the blue.

  I must say that it made me mighty proud.

  I sang God Bless America out loud

  to those goddam alligators then I got

  the biggest of the brutes with one sharp shot.

  (But a man might get, say, lovesick, then he shoots

  not one of your unendangered gator brutes

  that glide so gracefully through silver ooze

  and gladden gourmets in those Cross Creek stews,

  and instead of potting dumb beasts like your gators

  shoots the most acknowledged of all legislators,

  on whose scaled back as corpse and cortège glide

  the egret of the soul bums its last ride!)

  Stuck goat fat’s spitting from my still hot grill.

  I’ve eaten very well, and drunk my fill,

  and sip my Early Times, and to and fro

  rock in the rocker watching ashes blow

  off the white-haired charcoals and away

  into the darkness of the USA.

  Higher than the fireflies, not as high as stars,

  the sparks fly up between the red hot bars.

  I want no truck myself with outer space

  except to gaze on from some earthly place

  very much like this one in the South,

  the taste of Early Times warm in my mouth.

  Popping meals in pills in zero G

  ’s not the dining that would do for me.

  I’m feeling too composed to break the spell

  when mosquitoes probe the veins of mine that swell

  like blue earthworms. A head with sting

  burrows in the blue, starts syphoning.

  Let be! the watcher in me says, Let be!

  but suddenly the doer side of me

  (though my cracker neighbour couldn’t, though he’d tried,

  fathom if I’d got a doer side!)

  swats the bastard and its legs like hair

  sprout from my drop of blood on the cane chair.

  The day’s heat rolls away to make night thunder.

  I look at the clouded planets and I wonder

  if the God who blessed America’s keen eye,

  when He looked on that launching, chanced to spy,

  in this shrinking world with far too many men,

  either the cock-pecked wife who saw a pen …

  (If I’d seen it going I’d’ve said

  it was my snake sprayed silver, whose black head

  my neighbour battered concave like a spoon,

  pointing its harmless nose towards the moon,

 
lacquered in rigor mortis and not bent

  into eternity’s encirclement,

  curled in a circle, sucking its own tail,

  the formed continuum of female/male,

  time that devours and endlessly renews,

  time the open maw and what it chews,

  the way it had mine chewed down here on earth,

  the emblem of continuous rebirth

  a bleached spine like one strand of Spanish moss –

  for all the above vide sub Ouroboros!

  All this is booktalk, buddy, mere En-

  cyclopaedia know-how, not for men!) …

  either the cock-pecked wife who saw a pen,

  or the lurching rowboat where a red-faced man’s

  sprawled beside his shotgun and crushed cans,

  who saw a bullet streak off on its trek,

  and to that watching God was a mere speck,

  the human mite, his rowboat lapped with blood,

  the giant gator hunter killing BUD!

  The Fire-Gap

  A Poem with Two Tails

  The fire-patrol plane’s tail-fins flash.

  I see it suddenly swoop low,

  or maybe it’s scouting out the hash

  some ‘crackers’ round here grow.

  There’s nothing on our land to hide,

  no marijuana here,

  I think the patrol’s quite satisfied

  the fire-gap’s bulldozed clear.

  I’m not concerned what’s in the air

  but what’s beneath my feet.

  This fire-gap I walk on ’s where

  the snake and I will meet.

  Where we live is much the same

  as other land in the US,

  half kept cultivated, tame,

  and half left wilderness,

  and living on this fire-gap

  between wilderness and tilled

  is the snake my neighbours want to trap;

  they want ‘the motherfucker’ killed.

  One man I know round here who’s mean

  would blast the hole with dynamite

  or flood the lair with gasoline

  and maybe set the woods alight.

  Against all truculent advice

  I’ve let the rattler stay,

  and go each day with my flask of ice

  to my writing shed this way.

  I think the land’s quite big enough

  to contain both him and me

  as long as the odd, discarded slough

  is all of the snake I see.

  But I’m aware that one day on this track

  there’ll be, when I’m least alert,

  all six feet of diamondback

  poised to do me mortal hurt,

  or I might find its shrugged-off shed –

  ‘clothes on the beach’, ‘gone missing’,

  and just when I supposed him dead