by Jim Harrison
into the steady current, and that it wouldn’t force you
downward beyond the limit of your breath.
In high school I flunked chemistry, unable to bear
up under the foreign odors or comprehend the structure
of water. It’s one thing to say out loud “H-two-O,”
and another to have spent thousands of days in the company
of lakes, creeks and rivers seeing fish breathe
this liquid air. An old man feels the slow struggle
of dying, say for ten years, which drowning shortens
to a minute or so. People say it’s the best way to die.
Once in the Humboldt current off the coast of Ecuador
I looked into the eye of a whale and later wondered
if she communed with the soul of water. At nineteen
or twenty the cup is overflowing but not understood.
The dread is there won’t be time to drink it.
Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found
a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned
country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam
trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers
shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings
before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom
you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump
when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.
Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night
I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn
an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.
Some complain but I love this night music,
imagining that a few of the railroad cars are from
my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled
to my favorite, “Route of Phoebe Snow.”
To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.
There’s a dullish ache, a restlessness in those
who walk their dogs along the river’s levee.
None of us wants to find the body
but then it’s our duty to look in this early morning
light with a cool breeze coming off the crumpled water.
A tree plucked from the bank sails by and beauty
is visited by the terror of power. When my sister
was killed at nineteen I began to disbelieve
in destiny, in clocks and calendars, that the downward
thrust of time that hammers us into the ground
is planned, that the girl in France who wrote
me a letter before suicide was drawn to that place
by an ignored, thus insignificant, universe where God
wakes up cross, yawns and the dead are tossed
like confetti into the void. If there’s a divinity
that shapes our ends it’s beyond our ken. A tree
by its nature seeks its future moment by moment.
The child in grade-school science looks out the window
bemused that his singularity was chosen from millions
of his parents’ eggs and sperms. There’s much less time
than he thinks no matter how long he lives. The heart
can never grasp these unbearable early departures.
A concert in the park on the 4th of July sponsored
by the networks in New York. Someone named Sheryl Crow,
Hank Williams Junior not Senior, and my old favorite,
Los Lobos. As a claustrophobe I can’t walk the four blocks
into the crowds but from my studio
I can hear the Latino music wafting through maple
trees, imagining I’m at our winter casita near Patagonia,
Arizona, on the Mexican border, the music so much
closer to love and death than our own, the heart
worn on the sleeve, the natural lament of flowers, the moon
visible. Smiling skeletons are allowed to dance
and the gods draw closer to earth, the cash registers
drowned out in the flight of birds, the sound of water.
You can’t row or swim upstream on the river.
This moving water is your continuing past
that you can’t retrace by the same path
that you reached the present, the moment by moment
implacable indifference of time. At one point
in my life nearly every tree on earth was shorter
than me, and none of the birds presently here
were here at my birth except an aged macaw
in Bahia. Not a single bear or bug, dog or cat,
but a few turtles and elephants who greeted
my arrival. We can’t return for a second
to those golden days of the Great Depression, World War II,
the slaughter of the Jews, the Stalinist purges,
the yellow horde of China feeding on its afterbirth,
the Japanese gearing up scientific experiments
that would kill a quarter of a million. How auspicious
it is when people talk of the marvelous sixties
with the extermination of JFK, Bobby Kennedy,
Martin Luther King, Vietnam, and enough music
to divert us from the blood-splattered screen
of immediate history. Within time and the river
no one catches their breath, a vast prayer wheel
without a pivot spinning off into the void.
We’re wingless birds perpetually falling north.
Maybe I’m wrong. After years of practice
I learned to see as a bird but I refuse
to do it now, not wanting to find the body.
I traveled east to our cabin in Michigan
where I learned that my Zen master, Kobun
Chino Sensei, drowned in a cold pond trying to save
his three-year-old daughter, who also drowned.
I make nothing of this but my mind suddenly
rises far upward and I see Kobun in his black
robes struggling in the water and he becomes
a drowning raven who then frees himself for flight,
his daughter on the pond’s bottom rising to join him.
What could the vision mean but a gift? I said
maybe I’m wrong. The Resurrection is fatally correct.
As an early and relentless swimmer I couldn’t imagine
death by water until I saw a spring runoff
in the Manistee River, a shed floating by
as if powered by a motor, a deafening wave curling
upward at a log jam. I don’t want to die
in a car, at war, in an airliner where I searched
for the pulse of an old lady who collapsed
in the aisle, found nothing, and everyone said
she seemed to be smiling. She left the plane behind.
But water at least is an earthly embrace.
It was my wife who found the body while walking
her dog Mary beside the river at Mayor’s landing.
I was in Michigan in a cabin beside the river
made turbulent by an hour-long cloudburst.
I wish it wasn’t you, I said. “But it was,” she said.
“It had to be someone. Why not me?”
In Livingston I’m back home in Reed City
over fifty years ago when trains were steam but the cows
and alleys were the same, the friendly town mongrels
I said hello to, one who walked with me an hour
before turning home when we crossed his street.
From the park bridge I watch a heron feed and at the edge
of town there were yellow legs, Wilson’s phalaropes
wandering a sand and rock bar, at home in the river
because they could fly over it. I’m going to swim
across it on a moonlit night. Near the porch steps
of the house next door are two stone Chinese lions
looking at the street with the eyes of small gods,
the eyes that were given us that we don’t wish to use
for fear of madness. Beside the river’s bend
where he drowned colored stones are arranged
to say “We love you, T.J.” Not loved in past
tense but love in the way that the young have the grace
of their improbable affections, their hearts
rising to the unkempt breath and beat of the earth.
Hill
For the first time
far in the distance
he could see his twilight,
wrapping around the green hill
where three rivers start,
and sliding down toward him
through the trees until it reached
the blueberry marsh and stopped,
telling him to go away, not now,
not for the time being.
Buried Time
Our bodies leap ahead
and behind our years.
Our bodies tracked the sun
with numbers at play and curiosity
not for slavery.
Time often moves sideways,
its mouth full and choking
on rubbery clocks.
In the elephant’s heart
the uncounted sunrises, the muscle
pumping blood to its
red music.
The world’s air is full
of orphaned ghosts and on the ground
so many mammals that feed
at night for safety.
Our bodies move sideways
and backwards of their own accord
in scorn of time.
I didn’t divorce the sun and moon
but we had an amicable separation
for a while.
I established myself in the night.
I organized seven nights in a row
without any days.
I liked best the slender cracks
between nights and days where I bloomed
like an apple tree.
I collected dawns and twilights.
They are stored in my room between
two volumes of poetry, their titles secret.
In geologic time we barely exist.
I collected memories of my temporary host
leaving a trace of words, my simian tracks.
The universe is the Great Mother.
I haven’t met the father. My doubt
is the patina of shit the culture
paints on my psyche.
There is no “I” with the sun and moon.
Time means only the irretrievable.
If I mourn myself, the beloved dead,
I must mourn the deaths of galaxies.
Despite gravity we’re fragile as shadows.
They crushed us with time-as-money,
the linear hoax.
At the cabin standing in the river
on a warm night the female coyote
near the logjam can see the moon’s glint
off my single front tooth.
When she barks her voice wraps
itself with me in the moving water,
the holy form of time.
Angry Women
Women in peignoirs are floating around
the landscape well out of eyesight
let alone reach. They are as palpable
as the ghost of my dog Rose whom I see
on long walks, especially when exhausted
and my half-blind eyes are blurred by cold wind
or sleet or snow. The women we’ve mistreated
never forgive us nor should they, thus their ghostly
energies thrive at dawn and twilight in this vast
country where any of the mind’s movies can be played
against this rumpled wide-screened landscape.
Our souls are travelers. You can tell when your own
is gone, and then these bleak, improbable
visits from others, their dry tears because you were
never what you weren’t, so that the world
becomes only what it is, the unforgiving flow
of an unfathomable river. Still they wanted you otherwise,
closer to their dreamchild, just as you imagined
fair maidens tight to you as decals to guide
you toward certainties. The new pup, uncrippled by ideals,
leaps against the fence, leaps at the mountains beyond.
Before the Trip
When old people travel, it’s for relief
from a life that they know too well,
not routine but the very long slope
of disbelief in routine, the unbearable
lightness of brushing teeth that aren’t all
there, the weakened voice calling out
for the waiter who doesn’t turn;
the drink that once was neither here
nor there is now a singular act of worship.
The sun that rises every day says
I don’t care to the torments of love
and hate that once pushed one back
and forth on the blood’s red wagon.
All dogs have become beautiful
in the way they look at cats and wonder
what to do. Breakfast is an event
and bird flu only a joke of fear the world
keeps playing. On the morning walk
the horizon is ours when we wish.
We know that death is a miracle for everyone
or so the gods say in a whisper of rain
in the immense garden we couldn’t quite trace.
Paris Television
Thinking of those Russian schoolchildren. How can what we call depression be approached directly? It can’t. I have this triumverate of ghosts–John, Rose, Suzanne Wilson–who visit me. Mortality is gravity, the weight we bear up under daily. I can only create lightness out of doors–walking, fishing, standing in the yard looking at Linda’s flowers or the Absaroka mountains, or in the Upper Peninsula looking at the peculiar vastness of Lake Superior, the night sky, watching my grandsons. How can I lift my weight each day when my own words began to fail me this year, or my perceptions began to fail my words? When both my inside and outside worlds became incomprehensible? But then the source of all religion is incomprehension. The first day of school for the Russian children. Their dogs walk halfway, figure it out, return home to wait in the just-beginning-to-wane summer heat, with all flowers shedding themselves and neglected wheat stalks in the corners of fields dropping their grains, some dogs howling at the fireworks, and then the parents of the children joining them. My voice becomes small as a molting bird’s, barely a whisper until I can fly again, if ever.
Opal
O Opal, your ear
in my heart
both hear
the glorious void,
preferring the birds.
The Man Who Looked for Sunlight
Nine days of dark, cold rain
in October, some snow, three gales
off Lake Superior with the cabin’s tin roof
humming Beethoven, the woodcock weather vane
whirling and thumping like a kettledrum,
tree limbs crashing in the woods;
at dawn a gust made small whitecaps on the river.
Marquette NPR promised sunlight
on Thursday. I sit here reflecting
I’ve burned a whole cord of wood this week.
I’m ten years old again sitting here waiting
for the sunlight, petting my dog Rose,
sitting by the window straining for sunlight.
I’m not going to drown myself in the cold
dark river but I really would like sunlight.
Finally clouds rush by well beyond the speed
limit, and there’s a glimpse of sunlight,
a few seconds of sunlight, enough for today,
the sunlight glistening on the wet forest
and my dog sleeping by the window.
Alcohol
In the far back room of the school
for young writers are two big illegal
formaldehyde glass jars holding the kidneys
and livers of Faulkner and Hemingway
among the tens of thousands of empty bottles
of everything they drank to fuel themselves
through their bloody voyages. Alive, their arms
were crooked out as question marks trying
to encircle the world. Dead, they are crazy
old men who convinced us of the reasonableness
of their tales, their books deducted from their caskets
at the last possible moment. And now we hold
them tightly as if they ever truly cared.
No one should wish to enter this room
but still some of us hurl ourselves against
the invisible door as if our stories and alcohol
were Siamese twins ineluctably joined at the head,
our hearts enlarged until they can barely beat.
En Veracruz en 1941
Giselle me dio una estatuilla primitiva
de la Virgen de Sonora, estrellas radiando de su cabeza,
labios y cejas astillados, nariz descascarada
y debajo de su manto el niño
Jesús mira saludando con dos manos
elevadas, anunciando su llegada entre nosotros.
Giselle, ningún hombre puede acostarse con las tres:
madre, amante, Virgen.
Confieso que tus pezones son rojo rubí
pero en la muerte se tornarán turquesas.
Con tu pie desnudo sobre mi falda confieso también
que me despojaré de tu insoportable estatuilla,
o camino a La Habana la dejaré caer en el océano,
para que descanse en la falda del poeta de América, Hart Crane,
quien no pudo aprender el lenguaje de los chiles y las flores,
