by Jim Harrison
que la mar es madre no padre. No podemos estar solos.
¿Dónde estaba el perro para acariciar la mano con la que escribía?
Perro, te doy mi segunda empanada,
la sonrisa roja de mi corazón, el crepúsculo que lleva la mar
a mi cuarto donde Giselle duerme bien desnuda
sobre su vientre para que yo aúlle sin voz
al Caribe, porque no soy un perro de buena fe,
soy un perro poético a quien la luna devuelve con un aullido
su mensaje espantoso de llegada y despedida.
Madre, Virgen, amante sobre su vientre. Las tres son una,
pero estamos en partes, pies y cabeza de alguna manera
arrastrándose hacia nuestros cuerpos, moviéndose como yo ahora
bajo el ventilador, meciéndonos perpetuamente. Madre, Virgen,
perdónennos nuestras amantes. Una vez ustedes fueron mujeres.
~ probablemente escrito por Pablo Neruda
In Veracruz in 1941
Giselle gave me a primitive statuette
of the Virgin from Sonora, stars spoked from her head,
chipped lips and eyebrows, flaked nose,
and from underneath her skirt the infant
Jesus peeks out saluting with two raised
hands, announcing his arrival among us.
Giselle, no man can sleep with all three:
mother, lover, Virgin.
I confess that your nipples are ruby
but at death they will become turquoise.
With your bare foot in my lap I also confess
I’ll leave your unbearable statuette behind,
or en route to Havana drop it in the ocean,
to rest in the lap of America’s poet, Hart Crane,
who could not learn the language of chilies and flowers,
that the sea is mother not father. We can’t be alone.
Where was the dog to caress his writing hand?
Dog, I give you my second empanada,
my heart’s red smile, the twilight that carries the sea
into my room where Giselle sleeps quite naked
on her belly so that I give a voiceless howl
to the Caribbean, not being a bona fide dog
but a poetic dog at whom the moon howls back
her terrifying message of arriving and leave-taking.
Mother, Virgin, lover on her belly. The three are one,
but we are in parts, feet and head somehow
crawling toward our bodies, moving as I do now
under the fan endlessly rocking, Mother, Virgin,
forgive us our lovers. You were women once.
~ very likely by Pablo Neruda (translated by Jim Harrison)
Dream Love
How exhausted we can become
from the contents of dreams:
long, too long nights of love
with whirling corrupted faces,
unwilling visits from the dead
whom we never quite summoned;
the animals who chased our souls
at noon when we were children
so that we wished to be magical dogs
running backwards off the world’s
edge into a far better place
than a hot noon with earth herself
a lump in our weary young throats.
In dream love we’re playing
music to an empty room.
On leaving the room the music
continues and surrounds those we loved
and lost who are at roost
in their forested cemeteries,
visible but forever beyond our reach.
They won’t fly away until we join them.
Flower, 2001
Near a flowershop off boulevard Raspail
a woman in a sundress bending over,
I’d guess about 49 years of age
in a particular bloom, just entering
the early autumn of her life,
a thousand-year-old smile on her face
so wide open that I actually shuddered
the same shudder I did in 1989
coming over the lip of a sand dune
and seeing a big bear below me.
Patagonia Poem
Here in the first morning sunlight I’m trying
to locate myself not by latitude 31.535646° N,
or longitude 110.747511° W, but by the skin
of my left hand at the edge of the breakfast plate.
This hand has the skin and fingers of an animal.
The right hand forks the egg of a bird, a chicken.
The bright yellow yolk was formerly alive
in the guts of the bird waiting for the absent rooster.
Since childhood it has been a struggle
not to run away and hide in a thicket and sometimes
I did so. Now I write “Jim” with egg yolk
on the white plate in order to remember my name,
and suddenly both hands look like
an animal’s who also hides in a remote thicket.
I feel my head and the skull ever so slightly
beneath the skin, a primate’s skull that tells
me a thicket is a good idea for my limited
intelligence, and this hand holding a pen, a truly
foreign object I love, could with its brother hand
build a shelter in which to rest awhile and take
delight in life again, to wander in the moonlight
when earth achieves its proper shape, to rest looking
out through a tangle of branches at a daylight
world that can’t see back in at this animal shape.
Reading Calasso
I’m the pet dog of a family of gods
who never gave me any training.
Usually they are remote.
I curl up in an empty house
and they peek in the window when I’m sleeping.
Their children feed me table scraps
from ink-stained fingers.
Sometimes they lock me in a shed
and keep calling my name outside the door.
They expect me to bark day and night
because nearly everyone is their enemy.
The Bear
When my propane ran out
when I was gone and the food
thawed in the freezer I grieved
over the five pounds of melted squid,
but then a big gaunt bear arrived
and feasted on the garbage, a few tentacles
left in the grass, purplish white worms.
O bear, now that you’ve tasted the ocean
I hope your dreamlife contains the whales
I’ve seen, that one in the Humboldt current
basking on the surface who seemed to watch
the seabirds wheeling around her head.
Bars
Too much money-talk sucks the juice
out of my heart. Despite a fat wallet
I always become a welfare mother trying to raise
the price of a chicken for my seven children,
the future characters of my novels
who are inside me wanting to go to a bar.
They’re choking on unwritten book dust and need
a few drinks as much as I do. (We’re all
waiting to see what we become when we’re grown up.)
Everyone smart knows that alcohol is life’s
consolation prize for the permanently inconsolable.
Even my unborn characters who right now
are simpleminded demons sense the drinks
waiting for them when their bodies reach solid ground.
At four PM I resist for moments, head for the Bluebird
where in the parking lot I become a prescient animal,
probably a stray dog, hearing the ass-cheek squeak
of a woman passing on the sidewalk. A small male
fly follows her swinging left ankle and s
miles
looking upward in the season of summer dresses.
One drink and I’m petulant. Men in golf clothes
are talking about the stock market where once
men talked of farming, hunting, fishing, the weather.
If Holly weren’t sitting jauntily on a bar stool
I’d gulp and bolt. Something about a bar stool
that loves a woman’s bottom. Vodka makes me young
but not young enough and the men keep saying Lucent
Lucent Lucent. Secret powers only allow
me two drinks before dinner so I head for Dick’s Tavern
where actual working men talk of fishing,
crops, bankrupt orchards, the fact that the moon
is a bit smaller than it used to be. No one says Lucent,
only that the walleyes are biting short, but Lucent,
this preposterous French word afflicting so many
with melancholy, carries me back to Paris
where dozens of times I’ve entered the Select
on Montparnasse with hungry heart and mind.
When I’m there next month I’ll order my bottle
of Brouilly, perhaps a herring salad, say “Lucent”
loudly to a woman to see what happens. Wine
makes me younger than vodka and while I drink
I’ll pet the cat who after a dozen years will finally
sit on my lap, and think we’re better at nearly
everything than the French except how to live life,
a small item indeed. Once I left the Select
for the airport, de Gaulle, and twenty-four hours
later I was sitting in my cabin in the Upper Peninsula
waiting for a sow bear and two cubs to leave
the clearing so I could go to the bar, The Dunes Saloon,
and think over France in tranquility. The idea
of going to this bar draws in creature life. Once in the driveway
a female wolf stood in my headlights and nodded,
obviously the reincarnation of a girl I knew
who drowned in Key West where I first discovered
that one drink can break the gray egg that sometimes
encloses you, two drinks help you see this world.
Three drinks and you’re back inside the gray egg.
Diabetes
I’m drawing blood the night of the full moon,
also a full eclipse of the full moon.
When will this happen again in my life,
if ever? Maybe in yours, of course.
I’m drawing blood not in Vampirism
but in diabetes. Few can find the Carpathians
on the map. It would be unhealthy for a vampire
to drink my sugary blood, which is a river
miles in length, a rare round river,
billions of round rivers walking the earth
and flowing with blood. A needle pops
the finger and out it comes, always a surprise,
red as a rose rose red my heart pumps flower red.
You wonder who created this juice of life?
And what power in the blood, as the hymn goes.
The grizzly flips the huge dead buffalo like a pancake.
The bloody brain concocts its mysteries, Kennedy’s
fragments flying forever through the air in our neurons.
Walking outside with a bloody smear on my tingling
finger I stare at the half-shadowed bloodless
moon. Fifty yards away in September wolves killed
three of Bob Webber’s sheep. My wife Linda called
me in Paris to say that from our bedroom window
before dawn you could hear them eating the sheep.
Red blood on the beige grass of late September.
Searchers
At dawn Warren is on my bed,
a ragged lump of fur listening
to the birds as if deciding whether or not
to catch one. He has an old man’s
mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across
the yard and he walks after it
thinking he might close the widening distance
just as when I followed a lovely woman
on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn’t equal
her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes
moving into the distance, turning the final
corner, but when I turned the corner
she had disappeared and I looked up
into the trees thinking she might have climbed one.
When I was young a country girl would climb
a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face.
Warren and I are both searchers. He’s looking
for his dead sister Shirley, and I’m wondering
about my brother John who left the earth
on this voyage all living creatures take.
Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant
insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars.
Mother Night
When you wake at three AM you don’t think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children’s
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn’t arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber’s
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, “Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines,” fried me two eggs, then said,
“If you want to understand mortality look at birds.”
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.
The Creek
One. Two. Three.
Before six AM waking
to the improbable ache of confused
dreams so that the open world
of consciousness was to jump into hell.
Fled the house with my dog Rose,
crossed the creek and into a thicket
after counting three different beer cans
by the road, two varieties of water bottles.
Who hears?
asked the man with ears.
Eleven different birdcalls
and a vermilion flycatcher just beyond
my nose fluttering along a willow
branch unsure of my company
during his bug breakfast.
Who hears? Far above a soundless gray hawk
attacks and chases away two turkey vultures.
Looked up again and sensed the dead
lounging upon those billowing cumulus clouds.
I’ll check on this the next time I fly.
Birds Again
A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.
Becoming
Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin
grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle
a wife beater in New York City in 1957.
We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.
Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.
Portal, Arizona
I’ve been apart too long
from this life we have.
They deep-fry pork chops locally.
I’ve never had them that way.
In the canyon at dawn the Cooper’s hawk
rose from her nest. Lion’s pug marks
a few miles up where the canyon narrowed
and one rock had an eye with sky beyond.
A geezer told me Nabokov wrote here
while his beloved Vera tortured the piano.
He chased butterflies to their pinheaded doom
but Lolita survived. What beauty
