by Jim Harrison
fell across my not-so-sunken chest. The smallest
gods ask me what there is beyond consciousness,
the moment by moment enclosure the mind
builds to capture the rudiments of time.
Two nights ago I heard a woman from across
the creek, a voice I hadn’t heard since childhood.
I didn’t answer. Red was red this dawn
after a night of the swirling milk of stars
that came too close. I felt lucky not to die.
My brother died at high noon one day in Arkansas.
Divide your death by your life and you get
a circle, though I’m not so good at math.
This morning I sat in the dirt playing
with five cow dogs, giving out a full pail of biscuits.
Young Love
In my “Memoir of an Unsuccessful Prostitute”
I questioned what was it like to be nineteen
in New York City in 1957, fresh from northern
Michigan farmland, looking for sex and food.
First of all the edges of buildings were sharp
and if you walked around a corner too close
to them you could cut yourself. Even though it
was summer the daylight was short and when it
was hot you sweated inward. You walked the streets
as a shy elephant who within the cruelty
of his neurons had conceived a love of women.
A black woman said you were too white
and a white woman said you were too brown.
Another said you were a red Indian (“How
exciting”). You became very thin and fell asleep
beside fountains, on park benches, in the library
where they roused you with a shake. Pigeons
avoided you as a breadless monster. The circus women
paid in used popcorn, their secret currency.
The beatnik girl paid with crabs who tugged
at the roots of your eyebrows, your tiny friends.
Late one night the moon split in pieces
and you could see two yellow shards at the ends
of Forty-second Street where a herring sandwich
was a quarter, Italian sausage fifty cents.
The drug of choice was a Benzedrine inhaler
plus three beers, after which you jumped over the hood
of an approaching taxi with your invisible pogo stick.
You hitchhiked the trail of a letter from a girl back home
and New York City became more beautiful
with each mile west.
The Movie
I’m making a movie about my life
which never ends. The plot thickens
and thickens like an overcooked soup.
The movie features tens of thousands
of characters including those who passed
me on the street without knowing
that I was a star. The film includes
my long horizontal dives above fields
of corpses. I’ve become proud that I’m part
dog favoring perceptions over conclusions.
I’m not sexy enough at my age
to carry a movie so I’m filming my mind
at play, with the rudiments of Eros
backing into the camera with the force
of a drop forge. Ultimately the poet, filmmaker,
is the girl who didn’t have a date for the prom.
She takes a walk and hears the music
from the gymnasium, imagining the crepe
paper and wilting corsages vibrating
with the wretched music. She walks past
the graveyard with its heavy weight
of dirt nappers and climbs a hill steep
as a cow’s face. From the top of the hill
she sees the world she never made
but has changed with words into the arena
of the sacred. The sky becomes
dumbfounded with her presence. If she decides
to shoot herself it’s only to come to life again.
The thin slip of the moon speaks French
but the voice is compressed by trees and translated
by fireflies. This girl is far more interesting
than I am and that’s why I’m filming
her rather than my trip to the mailbox
avoiding the usual rattlesnakes in the tallgrass.
It’s not truth that keeps us alive
but invention, no actual past but the stories
we’ve devised to cover our disappearing
asses. Near a pond she hears the millions of
tree frogs, peepers, and thinks this noise is sex.
For a split second she wonders what it would
be like to make love to that older poet she heard
read in Grand Rapids, the way he grasped
her hand when he gave her a free book. My god,
now we’re nearly together in my movie though
the camera is the unwilling POV and when it
comes CLOSE she pushes down her jeans
near the thicket where I’ve been waiting.
In the faintest moonlight I see her pelvic curls.
Now it is time to back away from heaven’s mouth.
I don’t film dreams that lack narrative drive,
and besides I have no legs to leave the thicket,
only an imagination whose camera has chosen
to BACK AWAY far above the crucified dogs
and the soldiers writhing in alien courtyards,
above the swirling cumuli where those who we
thought were dead watch us while sitting on plastic
lounge chairs, up where the finest music still rises,
up there out of harm’s way where I store my life film
in microversion around the neck of a hawk who has
never landed since birth.
Livingston Suite
in memory of T.J. Huth
Shorn of nature,
here but in small supply,
townspeople adore their dogs.
Our dogs have never lived
in a town. Neither have I
since 1967. I adore
the puzzlement of our dogs.
Each morning I walk four blocks
to this immense river,
surprised that it’s still there,
that it won’t simply disappear
into the ground like the rest of us.
In the burnt July air
the strange cool odor
of sprinkler water
creating its own little breeze
in the Livingston Park
where there are twelve rings for playing
horseshoes built before the fathers of lies
built the clouds above our heads.
A lovely girl passes on her bicycle
with a fat cat
on her shoulder who watches me
disappear through heavy lids,
then a lovely soiled girl on her knees
in a garden looks up at me
to say hello. A Christian urge tries
to make me ignore her pretty butt
cocked upward like a she-cat’s.
Four churches within a block,
Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Congregational,
surrounding me with maudlin holiness,
Sunday’s hymns a droning hum
against the ceilings. Crows and magpies think,
Oh it’s that day again.
Christ in the New World like Milne’s Eeyore,
a lumpen donkey sweating with our greed,
trying to make us shepherd his billions of birds.
Under the streets are the remnants
of an older town with caches
of Indian skulls, also wizened
white scalps from those who jumped
the gun on the westward movement
that is still ending in
Santa Monica
where a girl I knew who, after taking three
California speedballs, had her brain hurled into eternity
like a jellied softball. Oh Cynthia.
I walk my dog Rose in the alleys
throughout town. Maybe it’s where poets belong,
these substreets where the contents of human life
can be seen more clearly, our shabby backsides
disappearing into the future at the precise rate
of the moon’s phases. Rose turns, hearing
an upstairs toilet flush, the dead cows,
pigs and chickens turning semiliquid
in the guts of strangers, the pretty tomato
changing shape, the potatoes that once held leaves
and blossoms in their spindly green arms. Holy days
of early summer with lilacs drooping laden
under the weight of their moist art. From a kitchen
a woman laughs a barking laugh over
something I’ll never know. A ninety-year-old
couple emerges from the Methodist church smiling,
masters of a superior secret. Back in the alley
a dirty yellow cat emerges from a garbage can
with trout remains, a sure sign of feline victory.
She holds the carcass tightly as if I might take it.
Our newspaper, The Enterprise, said,
“Grizzlies feasting on storm-killed cattle.”
An early June blizzard dropped four feet
of snow, killing a thousand cows and calves,
a few foals, and the grizzlies hungry and fresh
from hibernation are feasting. “The bears
are just thick. It’s really kind of dangerous
up here right now,” said Gus V., a rancher.
Interesting news on the summer solstice.
The cow protrudes from the snowbank with ravens
perched around the eyes & udders watching for a coyote
or bear to open the hidebound meat, nearly
a million pounds of meat spread around the
countryside. What pleasure in this natural terrorism.
On a twilight walk a violent storm moved swiftly
toward the east and south of me with the starkest
lightning striking against the slate-colored
Absaroka mountains. Closer, on a green mountainside
white trucks passed on Interstate 90,
then closer yet Watson’s Black Angus cattle
sprinkled like peppercorns against shiny
wet pale green grass. Closer, a tormented
cottonwood thicket in the rising wind, maybe
60 knots, branches flailing, closer the broad
and turbulent brown river. And finally
only me on which all things depend, standing
on the riverbank, bent to the wind, the solitary
twilight watcher wondering who is
keeping the gods alive this evening or whether
they have given up on us and our tiny forked tongues,
our bleating fears and greed, our pastel anxieties.
In 1968 when I was first here
there was a cool scent of pines
and melting snow from the mountains
carried by a southwind through the river’s
canyon. The scent is still here,
the sure fresh odor of the West.
At the oars of the drift boat
in the thrash and churn of a rapid
I have no more control over the boat,
or my life, than I had in 1968.
Swept away. And not quite understanding
that this water is heading toward
the Caribbean. A grizzly bear pisses
in a creek in the Absarokas and traces end up
nonchalantly passing New Orleans
into the Gulf of Mexico. This fuzzy air
above is from dust storms in China.
The underground river far below me
started in the Arctic and heads toward
the equator. During the Bush colonoscopy
narwhals were jousting over lady narwhals
and an immense Venezuelan anaconda gave birth
to a hundred miniatures of her kind, all quickly
eaten by waiting caimans and large wading birds.
Trapped in the compartment of a sunken ship
a man writes a letter in the dark to his wife
and children in Missouri which will never be read.
I watch a blind sheep who loves to roll in the grass.
At the rodeo the bucking horse
leaps then buckles to its knees,
recovers, then bucks up. And up.
The rider thrown, eating a face-
ful of dirt while behind the announcer’s
shack and across the river,
up a cliff and a broad green slope,
trucks pass east and west on 1-90
unmindful of the cowboy spitting dirt.
Around here they’re still voting
for Eisenhower as a write-in candidate.
Around here people still have memories
and honor their war dead. In the park
to each road guardrail a flag and white cross
are attached, and a name that is gone
but not forgotten. An old man carrying
a portable oxygen unit breathes deeply
with moist eyes looking at his brother’s name,
lost in Iwo Jima. We bow slightly
to each other, and my memory repeats the prayer
I offered at age five for my uncles Art and Walter
off in the South Pacific on warships fighting
the Japanese and the satanic Tojo. At church
we sang “Fairest Lord Jesus” and the minister
announced that a deacon’s son was lost
in what I heard as “yurp.”
Some of the men and women sobbed loudly.
I remembered him playing baseball and driving
around town in his old Ford coupe with an actual
squirrel tail attached to the aerial, and just out
of kindergarten I had it all wrong thinking who will
drive Fred’s car now? Our mothers and fathers embraced.
From different upstairs windows I see four different
mountain ranges not there to accompany the four churches:
the Absarokas, the Gallatins, the Bridgers, the Crazies.
You naturally love a mountain range called Crazies.
Of course naked women, Native and white,
run through the Crazies on moonlit nights
howling for husbands and lovers
lost to our wars. I’ve followed their red footprints
while hunting in these mountains, the small toes.
A community can drown in itself,
then come to life again. Every yard seems
to have flowers, every street its resident magpies.
In the outfield of the baseball diamond
there are lovely small white flowers that a gardener
told me are the “insidious bindweed.” All my life
I’ve liked weeds. Weeds are botanical
poets, largely unwanted. You can’t make a dollar
off them. People destroy the obnoxious dandelion
that I’ve considered a beautiful flower since early
childhood, blowing off the fuzzy seeds when they died,
sending the babies off into the grim universe,
but then I’m also fond of cowbirds and crows,
cowbirds and poets laying their eggs for others
to raise then drifting away for no reason.
Search & Rescue is “combing” the river
this morning for a drowned boy. If it were me
I’d rather float east through the night toward the rising
sun. But it’s not me. The boy probably
wasn’t literary and the pa
rents want the body
to bury, the fourth body in the river this summer.
Currents can hold a body tight to the bottom.
A vet friend found residual gills in the head
of a dog but at our best we’re ungainly in water
compared to the clumsiest of fishes. Against the song,
we won’t fly away. Or float. We sink into earth.
In this prolonged heat wave the snow
is shrinking upward to the mountain tip-tops
to a few crevasses and ravines. On Mount Wallace
ancient peoples, likely the Crow, the Absarokas,
carved out of flat stone the imprint of a man
so you could lie there in a grizzly-claw necklace
and see only sky for three days and nights,
a very long session in your own private church.
It’s ninety-five degrees at four PM
and two girls in their early teens step
from the cooler cement sidewalk onto the street’s hot
asphalt in their bare feet, beginning to dance,
jump, prance, one in shorts and the other
in a short summer dress. It is good enough
so that only Mozart would contribute to this pure
dance that is simply what it is, beyond passing
lust, sheer physical beauty, the grace of being
on a nearly insufferable hot day in Montana.
The girls skidded their feet on sprinkler-wet grass
under a maple tree, then went indoors out of my life.
Everyone seems to have loved the drowned boy.
Destiny is unacceptable. This grand river
he’d seen thousands of times didn’t wait for him.
Nobody seems to have a clue. He died two days ago
and they’re still searching the river. Some men
carry ominous long poles with a hook in the end.
This morning walking Rose I looked at the wide
eddy with a slow but inexorable whirlpool coiling
in upon itself that no human could swim against.
You might survive by giving up the struggle
and hope that the water would cast you aside
