by Jim Harrison
To a Meadowlark
for M.L. Smoker
Up on the Fort Peck Reservation
(Assiniboine and Sioux)
just as I passed two white crosses
in the ditch I hit a fledgling meadowlark,
the slightest thunk against the car’s grille.
A mean-minded God
in a mean-minded machine, offering
another ghost to the void to join the two
white crosses stabbing upward in the insufferable
air. Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving
ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing
each other out. We set this house
on fire forgetting that we live within.
Driving south of Wolf Point down by the Missouri:
M.L. Smoker is camped with her Indians,
tepees in a circle, eating buffalo meat for breakfast,
reminding themselves what life may have been.
She says that in the evenings the wild horses
from the terra incognita to the south come
to the river to drink and just stand there
watching the Indians dance. I leave quickly,
still feeling like a bullsnake whipping through
the grass looking for something to kill.
November
The souls of dogs,
big toes of ladies,
original clouds,
the winter life
of farm machinery,
the hammer lost
in the weeds,
the filaments of sunlight
hugging the bare tree,
then slipping off the bark
down into night.
Cold Poem
A cold has put me on the fritz, said Eugene O’Neill,
how can I forget certain things?
Now I have thirteen bottles of red wine
where once I had over a thousand.
I know where they went but why should I tell?
Every day I feed the dogs and birds.
The yard is littered with bones and seed husks.
Hearts spend their entire lives in the dark,
but the dogs and birds are fond of me.
I take a shower frequently but still
women are not drawn to me in large numbers.
Perhaps they know I’m happily married
and why exhaust themselves vainly to seduce me?
I loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars
and was paid back only by two Indians.
If I had known history it was never otherwise.
This is the song of the cold when people
are themselves but less so, people
who haven’t listened to my unworded advice.
I was once described as “immortal”
but this didn’t include my mother who recently died.
And why go to New York after the asteroid
and the floods of polar waters, the crumbling
buildings, when you’re the only one there
in 2050? Come back to earth.
Blow your nose and dwell on the shortness of life.
Lift up your dark heart and sing a song about
how time drifts past you like the gentlest, almost
imperceptible breeze.
Invasive
Coming out of anesthesia I believed
I had awakened in the wrong body,
and when I returned to my snazzy hotel room
and looked at Architectural Digest
I no longer recognized large parts of the world.
There was a cabin for sale
for seven million dollars, while mine had cost
only forty grand with forty acres. An android
from drugs I understood finally that life
works to no one’s advantage. From dawn
until midnight I put together a jigsaw puzzle
made of ten million pieces of white confetti.
On television I watch the overburdened world
of books and movies, all flickering trash, while outside
cars pass through deep puddles on the street,
the swish and swash of life, patterns of rain
drizzle on the windows, finch yodel and Mexican raven squawk
until I enter the murder of sleep and fresh demons,
one of whom sings in basso profundo Mickey and Sylvia’s
“Love Is Strange.” In the bathroom mirror it’s someone else.
On the Way to the Doctor’s
On Thursday morning at seven AM seven surgeons will spend seven hours taking me apart and putting me back together the same way. Three of the surgeons don’t have medical degrees but are part-time amateurs trying to learn the ropes. One is a butcher who wants to move up. A butcher’s salary is twenty-seven thousand and the average surgeon makes two hundred twenty-seven, the difference being the proximity of the nearest huge asteroid to the moon, which could be destroyed any minute now. In anticipation of the unmentionable I’ve put my life in order. Anyone with blood-slippery hands can drop a heart on the floor. I’ve sent a single-page letter of resignation to the Literary World but they haven’t had time to read it. They’re exhausted from reading Sontag’s obituaries, a nasty reminder that everyone dies. Assuming I survive, Jean Peters and Jean Simmons will reemerge as twenty-seven-year-olds and trade shifts nursing me around the clock. They’re goddesses and never get tired. Since the surgeons are cutting me open like a baked potato, sex will be put aside for the time being. It’s unpleasant to burst your stitches on a Sunday morning dalliance when you’re due on your gurney in the hospital Chapel of Black Roses. I’m not afraid of death. I’ve been told I’ll immediately return as a common house finch, but it’s all the stuff between here and death falsely called life. Right now we’re actually in the car with my wife driving to the doctor’s. I say, “Turn left on Ruthrauff onto La Cholla.” I always drive when we go to Tucson but I’m in too much pain half-reclining in the seat peeking out like the little old man I might not get to be. At the entrance to the office the doctor meets us with an immense bouquet of Brazilian tropical flowers. The doctor resembles a photo of my mother in 1933, so much so that I’m uncomfortable. The office is full of dozens of identical framed photos of a desperate sunset in the desert trying to look original. The office temperature is kept at 32 degrees to reduce odors. I’ve been recently sleeping under seven blankets and am quite cold. The pages of the magazines on the coffee table are blank so that you can make up your own National Geographics. I haven’t eaten for days except rice and yogurt, but my wife is out in the car having a baguette stuffed with proscuitto, imported provolone, mortadella and roasted peppers. They turn out the lights so my eyes don’t tire reading blank pages. Now I see that the mirror on the wall is two-way and in another room the seven surgeons are rolling up their sleeves, hot to get started. “We don’t have time to wash our hands,” they say in unison.
Español
Por años he creído que el mundo debe hablar español.
He soñado que hablaba y leía español,
pero cuando desperté no fue verdad. Tal vez las Naciones Unidas
puedan poner freno al inglés pero lo dudo.
El inglés es el lenguaje de la conquista, el dinero, el asesinato.
Dios me envió un e-mail diciendo que el sexo sería mejor
en español. Dios estaba fumando un “Lucky Strike”
mientras Bush mordisqueaba chicle “Dentyne” y estudiaba “Baywatch” en la tele.
Mi viejo amigo Jesús se convirtió en una película de terror
que ganó millones en inglés, el cual pensaba no había sido inventado.
Jesús habla español pero no entiende bien el inglés,
por eso nuestras oraciones erran y las chicas son deshimenizadas.
Niños y niñas yacen en sus camas pataleando
en desesperación a los dioses que juegan al boliche
con sus cabezas. No pasaría si hablaran español.
El dibujo animado es nuestra forma de arte mientras que los españoles escriben
poesía, miles de Lorcas de quinta elogiando a la luna
pero sin el contragiro de los dibujos en sus corazones. El sexo no nos conducirá
al cielo en español pero nos acercará más que los dibujos.
María Magdalena dijo que si no hubiera sido por la historia
se habría ahogado en el pozo o inventado
la pistola para que se la dispararan. Es tan compleja
que no puede ser entendida excepto en español.
Me arrojé de un avión pero aterricé en una nube de español.
El inglés me había perseguido a muerte. Los santos caen
sobre plumas ensangrentadas justo antes que la historia termine.
Spanish
For years I’ve believed the world should speak Spanish.
I’ve dreamt that I spoke and read Spanish,
but when I awoke it wasn’t true. Perhaps the U.N.
can put a halt to English but I doubt it.
English is the language of conquest, money, murder.
God e-mailed me that sex would be better
in Spanish. God was smoking a Lucky Strike
while Bush snapped Dentyne and studied Baywatch on TV.
My old pal Jesus became a horror film that made
millions in English that he thought hadn’t been invented.
Jesus speaks Spanish but understands English poorly,
thus our prayers go awry and girls are dehymenized.
Boys and girls lie on their beds kicking their feet
in desperation at the gods who are bowling
with their heads. It wouldn’t happen if they spoke Spanish.
Mexican TV said the Virgin wore underpants on Sunday.
The cartoon is our art form while the Spanish write
poetry, thousands of fifth-rate Lorcas praising the moon
but without cartoon backspin in their hearts. Sex won’t take
us to heaven in Spanish but closer than cartoons.
Mary Magdalene said that if it hadn’t been for history
she would have drowned herself at the well or invented
the gun for them to shoot her. She’s so complex
that she can’t be understood except in Spanish.
I jumped out of a plane but landed on a Spanish cloud.
English had chased me to death. The saints fall
on bloody feathers just before history ends.
the gun for them to shoot her. She’s so complex
that she can’t be understood except in Spanish.
I jumped out of a plane but landed on a Spanish cloud.
English had chased me to death. The saints fall
on bloody feathers just before history ends.
Pico
I don’t know what. I don’t know what.
I’m modern man at the crossroads,
an interstice where ten thousand roads meet
and exfoliate. Meanwhile today a hundred
dense blue never-seen-before pinyon jays
land in the yard for a scant ten minutes.
The pinyon jays are not at any crossroads
but are finding their way south by celestial navigation.
You’re not on a road, you fool. This life
is pathless with ninety billion galaxies
hovering around us, our home truly away from home.
The Short Course
For my new part I’m in makeup
each day for twenty-four hours.
We can die from this exhaustion
of shooting without a script;
the lines that didn’t come right disappeared
into the thickest air
without the vacuum of intentions.
New lines appeared in miraculous succession.
We found love by writing it down
only moments before she appeared.
The door opened itself.
Steps were taken.
A new day dawned crimson.
We went outside among the inhuman trees.
A creek appeared from nowhere.
Everyone is raised by the gods
but we never learned our lines.
Science
It was one of those mornings utterly distorted by the night’s dreams. Why go to court to change my name to Gaspar de la Nuit in order to avoid thinking of myself as a silly, fat old man? At midmorning I looked at the dogs as possibilities for something different in my life. I was dogsitting both daughters’ dogs plus our own: Lily, Grace, Pearl, Harry, Rose and Mary. I shook the biscuit box and they assembled in the living room on a very cold windy morning when no one wanted to go outside except for a quick pee and a bark at the mailman. I sang, “He’s got the whole world in his hands,” as they waited for their snack. Harry was embarrassed and furtive and tried to leave the room but I called him back. I tried, “Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today,” and Lily, the largest of the dogs, became angry at the others who looked away intimidated. I tried something religious, “The Old Rugged Cross,” to no particular response except that Mary leapt up at the biscuit box in irritation. I realized decisively that dogs don’t care about music and religion and thus have written up this report. This scarcely makes me the Father of the A-bomb, I thought as I flung the contents of the full box of biscuits around the room with the dogs scrambling wildly on the hard maple floor. Let there be happy chaos.
The Fish in My Life
When I was younger I walked the floor
of the Baltic looking for a perfect herring.
Off Ecuador when I swam underneath the boat
the hooked marlin was wreathed in curious sea snakes.
I stepped on a scorpion in Key West. It bit me.
It’s not a fish but it looks like a shrimp.
The nude girl ate the brook trout I fried. A morsel
plummeted from her lips to the left aureole.
Fish spend their lives underwater except for skyward jumps
for food, or to shake off gill lice, look around in dismay.
In the house of water the bottom and the top
do not go away. Our drowned bodies are kissed.
With my grandson’s Play-Doh I shaped
a modest fish, also the brown girl of my dreams.
O fish, my brothers and sisters, some scientists
think that our sinuses are merely vestigial gills.
Fish, we both survive among countless thousands
of dead eggs. We’re well chosen by the gods of chaos.
A Letter to Ted & Dan
France to Michigan
Just another plane trip
with the mind wandering
at large in the bowels
of life. How am I to land this?
At Godthåb, above Greenland,
we’re disappointing compared to the immensity
of our scientific reality, the trillions
of unresolved particles, though there were
those improbable unrecorded celebrations,
over a million at the samba festival,
a thousand bands, a million doves
eaten raw because there was no wood for fire,
an immense dance with no words with nonstop
loving in the fashion of lions and porpoises.
Off in the jungle anacondas perked up their heads
and slowly moved toward the music,
the largest snake of all wrapped around
the world’s waist, holding us together
against our various defilements, our naive
theocracies at war with one another.
Almost forgot that, over Iceland,
seven miles below I saw children
sledding in the first snow of the year,
small as motes of dust on silver-edged
sleighs, the glistening of the frosted sw
eat
of the shaggy pony that pulled them
back up the hill. I’ve long wondered
at the way certain children, even babies,
decide to become songbirds because they could see
the endless suffering in their future.
They’ve been using this method for centuries.
