by Jim Harrison
house and car and parents. I’m going to Greenland at dawn.
XXVII
I want a sign, a heraldic bird, or even an angel at midnight
or a plane ticket to Alexandria, a room full of good dreams.
This won’t do; farmlife with chickens clucking in the barnyard,
lambs, cows, vicious horses kicking when I bite their necks.
The woman carved of ice was commissioned by certain unknown
parties and lasted into a March thaw, tits turning to water.
Phone call. That strange cowboy who pinned a button to the boy’s
fly near the jukebox – well last night he shot his mom.
Arrested, taken in as it were for having a purple fundament,
a brain full of grotesqueries, a mouth exploding with red lies.
Hops a plane to NYC riding on the wing through a thunderstorm,
a parade, a suite at the Plaza, a new silver-plated revolver.
XXVIII
In the hotel room (far above the city) I said I bet you
can’t crawl around the room like a dog hoho. But she could!
All our cities are lewd and slippery, most of all San Francisco
where people fuck in the fog wearing coarse wool.
And in Los Angeles the dry heat makes women burn so that
lubricants are fired in large doses from machine guns.
We’ll settle the city question by walking deeply into forests
and in reasonably vestal groves eat animal meat and love.
I’m afraid nothing can be helped and all letters must be
returned unopened. Poetry must die so poems will live again.
Mines: there were no cities of golden-haired women down there
but rats, raccoon bones, snake skeletons and dark. Black dark.
XXIX
For my horse, Brotherinlaw, who had no character
breaking into panic at first grizzly scent.
Stuff this up your ass New York City you hissing
clip joint and plaster-mouthed child killer.
In Washington they eat bean soup and there’s
bean soup on the streets and in the mouths of monuments.
The bull in the grove of lodgepole pines, a champion
broke his prick against a cow and is now worthless.
For that woman whose mouth has paper burns
a fresh trout, salt, honey, and healing music.
XXX
I am walked on a leash by my dog and am water
only to be crossed by a bridge. Dog and bridge.
An ear not owned by a face, an egg without a yolk
and my mother without a rooster. Not to have been.
London has no bees and it is bee time. No hounds
in the orchard, no small craft warnings or sailing ships.
In how many poems through how many innocent branches
has the moon peeked without being round.
This song is for New York City who peeled me like
an apple, the fat off the lamb, raw and coreless.
XXXI
I couldn’t walk across that bridge in Hannibal
at night. I was carried in a Nash Ambassador.
On Gough Street the cars went overhead. I counted
two thousand or more one night before I slept.
She hit him in the face with her high-heeled shoe
as he scrambled around the floor getting away.
What am I going to do about the mist and the canning
factory in San Jose where I loaded green beans all night?
Billions of green beans in the Hanging Gardens off Green
Street falling softly on our heads, the dread dope again.
XXXII
All those girls dead in the war from misplaced or aimed
bombs, or victims of the conquerors, some eventually happy.
My friends, he said after midnight, you all live badly.
Dog’s teeth grew longer and wife in bed became a lizard.
Goddamn the dark and its shrill violet hysteria.
I want to be finally sane and bow to all sentient creatures.
I’ll name all the things I know new and old any you may
select from the list and remember the list but forget me.
It was cold and windy and the moon blew white fish across
the surface where phosphorescent tarpon swam below.
Ice in the air and the man just around the corner has a gun
and that nurse threw a tumor at you from the hospital window.
XXXIII
That her left foot is smaller if only slightly
than her right and when bare cloven down to the arch.
Lovers when they are up and down and think they are whirling
look like a pink tractor tire from the ceiling.
Drag the wooden girl to the fire but don’t throw
her in as would the Great Diana of Asia.
Oh the price, the price price. Oh the toll, the toll toll.
Oh the cost, the cost cost. Of her he thought.
To dogs and fire, Bengal tiger, gorilla, Miura bull
throw those who hate thee, let my love be perfect.
I will lift her up out of Montana where her hoof
bruised my thigh. I planted apple trees all day.
XXXIV
When she walked on her hands and knees in the Arab
chamber the fly rod, flies, the river became extinct.
When I fall out of the sky upon you again I’ll
feather at the last moment and come in feet first.
There are rotted apples in the clover beneath the fog
and mice invisibly beneath the apples eat them.
There is not enough music. The modal chord I carried
around for weeks is lost for want of an instrument.
In the eye of the turtle and the goldfish and the dog
I see myself upside down clawing the floor.
XXXV
When she dried herself on the dock a drop of water
followed gravity to her secret place with its time lock.
I’ve been sacrificed to, given up for, had flowers
left on my pillow by unknown hands. The last is a lie.
How could she cheat on me with that African? Let’s refer
back to the lore of the locker room & shabby albino secrets.
O the shame of another’s wife especially a friend’s.
Even a peek is criminal. That greener grass is brown.
Your love for me lasted no longer than my savings for Yurp.
I couldn’t bear all those photos of McQueen on your dresser.
Love strikes me any time. The druggist’s daughter, the 4-H
girl riding her blue-ribbon horse at canter at the fair.
XXXVI
A scenario: I’m the Star, Lauren, Faye, Ali, little stars,
we tour America in a ’59 Dodge, they read my smoldering poems.
I climbed the chute and lowered myself onto the Brahma bull,
we jump the fence trampling crowds, ford rivers, are happy.
All fantasies of a life of love and laughter where I hold your
hand and watch suffering take the very first boat out of port.
The child lost his only quarter at the fair but under the grandstand
he finds a tunnel where all cowshit goes when it dies.
His epitaph: he could dive to the bottom or he paddled in black
water or bruised by flotsam he drowned in his own watery sign.
In the morning the sky was red as were his eyes and his brain
and he rolled over in the grass soaked with dew and said no.
XXXVII
Who could knock at this door left open, repeat
this after me and fold it over as an endless sheet.
I love or I am a pig which perhaps I should be,
a poisoned ham in the dining room of Congress.
Not to kill but to infect with me
rcy. You are known
finally by what magazines you read in whose toilet.
I’ll never be a cocksman or even a butterfly. The one
because I am the other, and the other, the other one.
This is the one song sung loud though in code: I love.
A lunepig shot with fatal poison, butterfly, no one.
XXXVIII
Once and for all to hear, I’m not going to shoot anybody
for any revolution. I’m told it hurts terribly to be shot.
Think that there are miniature pools of whiskey in your flesh
and small deposits of drugs and nicotine encysted in fat.
Beautiful enchanted women (or girls). Would you take your
places by my side, or do you want to fuck up your lives elsewhere?
The veteran said it was “wall-to-wall death” as the men had
been eating lunch, the mortar had hit, the shack blown to pieces.
We’ll pick the first violets and mushrooms together & loiter
idyllically in the woods. I’ll grow goat feet & prance around.
Master, master, he says, where can I find a house & living
for my family, without blowing my whole life on nonsense?
XXXIX
If you laid out all the limbs from the Civil War hospital
in Washington they would encircle the White House seven times.
Alaska cost two cents per acre net and when Seward
slept lightly he talked to his wife about ice.
My heart is Grant’s for his bottle a day and his
foul mouth, his wife that weighed over five hundred pounds.
A hundred years later Walt Whitman often still
walks the length of the Potomac and on the water.
A child now sees it as a place for funerals and bags
of components beneath the senators’ heads.
XL
If you were less of a vowel or had a full stop in your
brain. A cat’s toy, a mouse stuffed with cotton.
It seems we must reject the ovoid for the sphere,
the sphere for the box, the box for the eye of the needle.
And the world for the senate for the circus
for the war for a fair for a carnival. The hobbyhorse.
The attic for a drawer and the drawer for a shell.
The shell for the final arena of water.
That fish with teeth longer than its body is ours
and the giant squid who scars the whale with sucker marks.
XLI
Song for Nat King Cole and the dog who ate the baby
from the carriage as if the carriage were a bowl.
A leafy peace & wormless earth we want, no wires,
connections, struts or props, only guitars and flutes.
The song of a man with a dirty-minded wife – there is
smoke from her pit which is the pit of a peach.
I wrenched my back horribly chopping down a tree – quiff,
quim, queeritus, peter hoister, pray for torn backs.
The crickets are chirping tonight and an ant crosses
the sleeping body of a snake to get to the other side.
I love the inventions of men, the pea sheller, the cherry
picker, the hay baler, the gun and throne and grenade.
XLII
New music might, that sucks men down in howls
at sea, please us if trapped in the inner ear.
When rising I knew there was a cock in that dream
where it shouldn’t have been I confess I confess.
Say there this elbow tips glass upward, heat rolls
down in burns, say hallow this life hid under liquid.
Late in the morning Jesus ate his second breakfast,
walked out at five years, drove his first nail into a tree.
Say the monkey’s jaw torn open by howling, say after
the drowned man’s discovered scowling under the harbor’s ice.
XLIII
Ghazal in fear there might not be another
to talk into fine white ash after another blooms.
He dies from it over and over; Duncan has
his own earth to walk through. Let us borrow it.
Mary is Spanish and from her heart comes forth
a pietà of withered leather, all bawling bulls.
Stand in the wine of it, the clear cool gold
of this morning and let your lips open now.
The fish on the beach that the blackbirds eat
smell from here as dead men might after war.
XLIV
That’s a dark trough we’d hide in. Said his
sleep without frisson in a meadow beyond Jupiter.
It is no baronet of earth to stretch to – flags
planted will be only flags where no wind is.
Hang me rather there or the prez’s jowl on a stick
when we piss on the moon as a wolf does NNW of Kobuk.
I’ll be south on the Bitterroot while you’re up there
and when you land I’ll fire a solitary shot at moonface.
I wish you ill’s ills, a heavy thumb & slow hands
and may you strike hard enough to see nothing at all.
XLV
What in coils works with riddle’s logic, Riemann’s
time a cluster of grapes moved and moving, convolute?
As nothing is separate from Empire the signs change
and move, now drawn outward, not “about” but “in.”
The stars were only stars. If I looked up then it was
to see my nose flaring on another’s face.
Ouspensky says, from one corner the mind looking for
herself may go to another then another as I went.
And in literal void, dazzling dark, who takes
who where? We are happened upon and are found at home.
XLVI
O she buzzed in my ear “I love you” and I dug at
the tickle with a forefinger with which I knew her.
At the post office I was given the official FBI
Eldridge Cleaver poster – “Guess he ain’t around here.”
The escaping turkey vulture vomits his load of rotten
fawn for quick flight. The lesson is obvious & literary.
We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.
We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.
I say it from marrow depth I miss my tomcat gone now from
us three months. He was a fellow creature and I loved him.
XLVII
The clouds swirling low past the house and
beneath the treetops and upstairs windows, tin thunder.
On the hill you can see far out at sea a black ship
burying seven hundred yards of public grief.
The fish that swam this morning in the river swims
through the rain in the orchard over the tips of grass.
Spec. Forces Sgt. Clyde Smith says those fucking
VC won’t come out in the open and fight. O.K. Corral.
This brain has an abscess which drinks whiskey
turning the blood white and milky and thin.
The white dog with three legs dug a deep
hole near the pear tree and hid herself.
XLVIII
Dog, the lightning frightened us, dark house and both of us
silvered by it. Now we’ll have three months of wind and cold.
Safe. From miracles and clouds, cut off from you and your
earthly city, parades of rats, froth, and skull tympanums.
The breathing in the thicket behind the beech tree was a deer
that hadn’t heard me, a doe. I had hoped for a pretty girl.
Flickers gathering, swallows already gone. I’m going south
to the Yucatán or Costa Rica and foment foment and fish.
In the Sudan grass waving, roots white cords, utterly hidden
and only the hou
nds could find me assuming someone would look.
The sun shines coldly. I aim my shotgun at a ship at sea
and say nothing. The dog barks at the ship and countless waves.
XLIX
After the “invitation” by the preacher she collapsed in the
aisle and swallowed her tongue. It came back out when pried.
No fire falls and the world is wet not to speak of gray and
heat resistant. This winter the snow will stay forever.
