by Jim Harrison
in Sweden he’d never seen, incestuously,
in some flower-strewn woods near the water.
After a New Year’s and his first French meal,
enchantée of course pursing her thick lips,
throwing one leg over the other
in the abandonment of sitting down,
throwing off room-length heat beneath layers
of nylon, stuffed with turbot and filet as she is,
splendidly in health, though her only apparent
exercise is screwing, “making the love,”
not gentle-like but as a Mack truck
noses a loading platform.
III
The same “she” seen from a bus
or store window, often too young,
across the subway tracks in pure ozone,
the blond cheerleader with legs
bared to hundreds of eyes.
Always a fool before the coins –
I Ching forcing turmoil, the cauldron.
The fool has eyes and touch,
is mammalian. He lacks all odds,
ruts then is scathed. There’s Helen
in a Greek nightclub, a hundred
years old and selling pistachios,
half a century away from any bed –
her face a shucked pecan.
Near the shore in a bed of reeds
he finally sees her for a moment,
the moon their only witness,
a single white eye;
her face is swirling in the dark,
changing faces a thousand times
then slipping back into black water.
But they are confections, put-together things
who will not stay in or go out but pause
on the edge of a room or wherever they are,
uncertain of what they are or whether they care.
So are they praised for what they aren’t, young,
and blamed for what they haven’t, a wilderness
of blood; pitiful creatures, calcined, watery,
with airbrushed bodies and brains.
I write this out of hard silence
to be rid of it. Not, as once, in love,
chin on breastbone as if the head
by its own dull weight would snap,
a green flower from a green stem.
LULLABY FOR A DAUGHTER
Go to sleep. Night is a coal pit
full of black water –
night’s a dark cloud
full of warm rain.
Go to sleep. Night is a flower
resting from bees –
night’s a green sea
swollen with fish.
Go to sleep. Night is a white moon
riding her mare –
night’s a bright sun
burned to black cinder.
Go to sleep,
night’s come,
cat’s day,
owl’s day,
star’s feast of praise,
moon to reign over
her sweet subject, dark.
SEQUENCE
I
The mad have black roots in their brains
around which vessels clot and embrace
each other as mating snakes.
The roots feed on the brain until the brain
is all root – now the brain is gray
and suffocates in its own folds.
The brain grows smaller and beats
against its cage of bone
like a small wet bird.
Let us pity the mad we see every day,
the bird is dying without air and water
and growing smaller,
the air is cold, her beak is sharp,
the beating shriller.
2
He loves her until
tomorrow or until 12:15 AM
when again he assumes the firedrake,
ricochets from the walls
in the exhaustion of kingship;
somewhere in his skull the Bible’s leaves
seem turned by another’s hand.
The pool table’s green felt is earth,
ivory balls, people cracked toward leather holes.
Christ’s blood is whiskey. Light is dark.
And light from a cave in whose furnace
three children continue their burning.
3
The dead haloed in gladiolus
and electric organs,
those impossible hurts, trepanations,
the left eye punctured with glass;
he’ll go to Canada with his dog,
a truly loved and loving creature –
fish in the water, bear in his den.
Not fox shrinking before foxhound
snaps its neck, horse cowered before crop.
4
In the woods the low red bridge,
under it and above the flowing water,
spiders roost in girder’s
rust and scale, flaking to touch.
Swift clear water. Soiled sand,
slippery green moss on rock face.
From the red bridge, years back
he dove into an eddy catching
the river’s backward bend and swirl,
wishing not to swim on or in
as a duck and fish
but to be the water herself,
flowing then and still.
COLD AUGUST
The sun had shrunk to a dime,
passing behind the smallest
of clouds; the field was root
bare – shorthorns had grazed
it to leather. August’s coldest
day when the green, unlike
its former self, returned to earth
as metal. Then from a swamp
I saw two large shadows floating
across the river, move up the sloping
bank, float swiftly as shadows against
the field toward where I stood.
I looked up as two great red-tailed
hawks passed overhead; for an instant
I felt as prey then wheeled to watch
them disappear in southward course.
NIGHT IN BOSTON
From the roof the night’s the color
of a mollusk, stained with teeth and oil –
she wants to be rid of us and go to sea.
And the soot is the odor of brine
and imperishable sausages.
Beneath me from a window I hear “Blue Hawaii.”
On Pontchartrain the Rex Club
dances on a houseboat in a storm –
a sot calms the water without wetting a foot.
I’d walk to Iceland, saluting trawlers.
I won’t sell the rights to this miracle.
It was hot in Indiana.
The lovers sat on a porch swing, laughing;
a car passed on the gravel road,
red taillights bobbing over the ruts,
dust sweeping the house,
the scent of vetch from the pasture.
Out there the baleen nuzzles his iceberg,
monuments drown in the lava of birdshit.
I scuffle the cinders but the building doesn’t shudder –
they’ve balanced it on a rock.
The Charles floats seaward, bored with history.
Night, cutting you open
I see you’re full of sour air
like any rubber ball.
FEBRUARY SWANS
Of the hundred swans in West Bay
not one flies south in winter.
They breathe the dust of snow
swirling in flumes across the water,
white as their whiteness;
bones slighted by hunger
they move through the clots of ice,
heads looped low and tucked to the wind,
looking for fish in the deep greenness of water.
Now in the country, far from the Bay,
from a dark room I see a swan gliding
/> down the street, larger than a car, silent.
She’ll need a fish the size of a human
to feed her hunger, so far from the water.
But there’s nothing to eat between those snowbanks.
She looks toward my window. I think:
Go back to the Bay, beautiful thing,
it was thirty below last night.
We gaze at each other until my breath
has glazed the window with frost.
THIN ICE
Now this paste of ash and water;
water slipping over ice, greenish
brown water, white ice, November ice,
thin as glass, shot with air.
The kinglet, soundless, against the yellow
grapeleaves of the arbor, smallest of birds;
shrill day, the blowing, oily Atlantic off
Strong’s Neck; the salt smell drifts, blown
through the newish Cape Cod homes.
On such days children fall down wells,
or drown falling through thin first ice,
or fall reaching after the last apple
the picker neglected, the tree leafless,
the apple spoiled anyway by frost; toad freezes,
snake’s taken his hole; the cat makes much
shorter trips; dog’s bark is louder.
The green has floated from earth, moved south,
or drifted upward at night, invisible to us.
Man walks, throwing off alone thin heat;
this cold’s life, death’s steamy mark and target.
NATURAL WORLD
I
The earth is almost round. The seas
are curved and hug the earth, both
ends are crowned with ice.
The great Blue Whale swims near
this ice, his heart is warm
and weighs two thousand pounds,
his tongue weighs twice as much;
he weighs one hundred fifty tons.
There are so few of him left
he often can’t find a mate;
he drags his six-foot sex
through icy waters,
flukes spread crashing.
His brain is large enough
for a man to sleep in.
2
On Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania
thousands upon thousands
upon thousands of hawks in migration
have been slaughtered for pleasure.
Drawn north or south in spring and fall:
merlin and kestrel, peregrine, gyrfalcon,
marsh hawk, red-tailed, sharp-tailed,
sharp-shinned, Swainson’s hawk,
golden eagle and osprey
slaughtered for pleasure.
MOVING
Not those who have lived here and gone
but what they have left: a worn-out broom,
coat hangers, the legs of a doll,
errors of possession to remind us of ourselves;
but for drunkenness or prayers the walls
collapse in boredom, or any new ecstasy
could hold them up, any moan or caress
or pillow-muffled laugh;
leaving behind as a gift seven rooms of air
once thought cathedral, those imagined
beasts at windows,
her griefs hung from the ceiling for spectacle.
But finally here I am often there
in its vacant shabbiness,
standing back to a window in the dark,
carried by the house as history, a boat,
deeper into a year, into the shadow
of all that happened there.
WHITE
To move into it again, as it was,
the cows rattling in black stalls,
lowing beneath the wind, the elm
against the barn, thrashing
there as shadow, all loose boards
creaking, the moon drawn,
pushed rolling white by wind
and fat,
bone white
snow-and-flour white
white white
moving into the puddle by the lilacs,
whiter there, rippling white
beneath dark green twisting petals.
To be silvered by her as the barn,
the grass, the manure pile, the lilacs,
to look again at the reflection
of her huge eye in water.
AFTER THE ANONYMOUS SWEDISH
Seventeenth century
Deep in the forest there is a pond,
small, shaded by a pine so tall
its shadow crosses her surface.
The water is cold and dark and clear,
let it preserve those who lie at the bottom
invisible to us in perpetual dark.
It is our heaven, this bottomless
water that will keep us forever still;
though hands might barely touch they’ll never
wander up an arm in caress or lift a drink;
we’ll lie with the swords and bones
of our fathers on a bed of silt and pine needles.
In our night we’ll wait
for those who walk the green and turning earth,
our brothers, even the birds and deer,
who always float down to us
with alarmed and startled eyes.
DAWN WHISKEY
Mind follow the nose
this honey of whiskey
I smell through the throat of the bottle.
I hear a wren in the maple
and ten million crickets,
leaf rustle
behind the wren and crickets,
farther back a faint dog bark.
And the glass is cool,
a sweet cedar post that flames so briskly.
Sight bear this honey
through the shell curved around the brain,
your small soft globes
pouring in new light –
remember things that burn with gold
as this whiskey to my tongue.
LEGENDA
This song stays.
No new one carries us, bears
us so high, more swiftly.
And it has no place,
it changes as we change
death drawn to silence
at noon or in still night,
who knows another, wishes one.
None wishes night,
but only one night, one day,
sun and dark at final rest.
River at spring crest,
sky clear blue,
forest at June greenness,
delight of eye in brain fully flowering,
delight of air and light and breath.
A YEAR’S CHANGES
This nadir: the wet hole
in which a beast heaps twigs and bits
of hair, bark and tree skin,
both food and turds mix in the warm
dust its body makes.
In winter the dream of summer,
in summer the dream of sleep,
in spring feasting,
living dreams through the morning.
Fall, my cancer, pared to bone,
I lost my fur, my bite gone dull,
all edges, red and showing; now naked,
February painted with ice, preserve me
in wakefulness – I wait for the rain,
to see a red pine free of snow,
my body uncrabbed, unleashed,
my brain alive.
In northern Manitoba
a man saw a great bald eagle –
hanging from its neck,
teeth locked in skin and feathers,
the bleached skull of a weasel.
To sing not instinct or tact,
wisdom,
the song’s full stop and death,
but audible things, things moving
at noon in full raw light;
a dog moving around
the tree wit
h the shade –
shade and dog in motion –
alive at noon in full natural light.
This nightflower, the size of a cat’s head –
now moist and sentient –
let it hang there in the dark;
bare beauty asking nothing of us,
if we could graft you to us,
so singular and married to the instant.
But now rest picked, a trillium
never to repeat yourself. Soon enough
you’ll know dead air, brief homage,
a sliver of glass in someone’s brain.
Homesick for a dark, clear black space
free of objects; to feel locked as wood
within a tree, a rock deep enough
in earth never to see the surface.
Snow. There’s no earth left under it.
It’s too cold to breathe.
Teeth ache, trees crack, the air is bluish.
My breath goes straight up.
This woods is so quiet
that if it weren’t for the buffer of trees
I could hear everything on earth.
Only talk. Cloth after the pattern is cut,
discarded, spare wood barely kindling.
At night when the god in you trips,
hee-haws, barks and refuses to come
to tether. Stalk without quarry.
Yesterday I fired a rifle into the lake.
A cold spring dawn
