by Jim Harrison
The dead cherry trees diseased with leaf rot were piled and
soaked with fuel oil, flames shooting upward into the rain.
Rouse your soul to frenzy said Pasternak. Icons built
of flesh with enough heat to save a life from water.
A new sign won’t be given and the old ones you forgot won’t
return again until the moment before you die, unneeded then.
Fuse is wet, match won’t light it and nothing will. Heat comes
out of the center, radiates faintly and no paper will burn.
L
A boot called Botte Sauvage renders rattlers harmless but they
cost too much; the poet bitten to death for want of boots.
I’m told that black corduroy offers protection from moonburn
and that if you rub yourself with a skunk, women will stay away.
There is a hiding place among the relics of the fifties, poets
hiding in the trunks of Hudson Hornets off the Merritt Parkway.
They said she was in Rome with her husband, a sculptor, but
I’m not fooled. At the Excelsior I’ll expose her as a whore.
Down in the canyon the survivors were wailing in the overturned
car but it was dark, the cliffs steep, so we drove on to the bar.
She wants affection but is dressed in aluminum siding and her
edges are jagged; when cold, the skin peels off the tongue at touch.
LI
Who could put anything together that would stay in one place
as remorseless as that cabin hidden in the maple grove.
In Nevada the whores are less clean and fresh than in
Montana, and do not grow more beautiful with use.
The car went only seventeen miles before the motor burned up
and I sat in the grass thinking I had been taken and was sad.
This toothache means my body is wearing out, new monkey glands
for ears in the future, dog teeth, a pink transplanted body.
She is growing old. Of course with the peach, apple, plum,
you can eat around the bruised parts but still the core is black.
Windemere and Derwent Water are exhausted with their own
charm and want everyone to go back to their snot-nosed slums.
LII
I was lucky enough to have invented a liquid heart
by drinking a full gallon of DNA stolen from a lab.
To discover eleven more dollars than you thought you
had and the wild freedom in the tavern that follows.
He’s writing mood music for the dead again and ought to have
his ass kicked though it is bruised too much already by his sport.
Both serpent becoming dragon and the twelve moons lost
at sea, worshiped items, rifts no longer needed by us.
Hot Mickey Mouse jazz and the mice jigging up the path
to the beehive castle, all with the bleached faces of congressmen.
LIII
These corners that stick out and catch on things
and I don’t fill my body’s clothes.
Euclid, walking in switchbacks, kite’s tip, always
either up or down or both, triangular tongue & cunt.
Backing up to the rose tree to perceive which of its
points touch where. I’ll soon be rid of you.
There are no small people who hitch rides on snakes
or ancient people with signs. I am here now.
That I will be suicided by myself or that lids close over
and over simply because they once were open.
We’ll ask you to leave this room and brick up the door
and all the doors in the hallway until you go outside.
LIV
Aieeee was said in a blip the size of an ostrich egg,
blood pressures to a faint, humming heart flutters.
I can’t die in this theater – the movie, Point Blank,
god’s cheap abuse of irony. But the picture is fading.
This dry and yellow heat where each chicken’s
scratch uproots a cloud and hay bursts into flame.
The horse is enraged with flies and rolls over
in the red dirt until he is a giant liver.
From the mailman’s undulant car and through the lilacs
the baseball game. The kitchen window is white with noon.
LV
The child crawls in widening circles, backs to the wall
as a dog would. The lights grow dim, his mother talks.
Swag: a hot night and the clouds running low were brains and I
above them with the moon saw down through a glass skull.
And O god I think I want to sleep within some tree
or on a warmer planet beneath a march of asteroids.
He saw the lady in the Empire dress raise it to sit bare
along the black tree branch where she sang a ditty of nature.
They are packing up in the lamplight, moving out again
for the West this time sure only of inevitable miracles.
No mail delights me as much as this – written with plum juice
on red paper and announcing the rebirth of three dead species.
LVI
God I am cold and want to go to sleep for a long time
and only wake up when the sun shines and dogs laugh.
I passed away in my sleep from general grief and a seven-
year hangover. Fat angels wrapped me in traditional mauve.
A local indian maiden of sixteen told the judge to go
fuck himself, got thirty days, died of appendicitis in jail.
I molded all the hashish to look like deer & rabbit turds
and spread them in the woods for rest stops when I walk.
Please consider the case closed. Otis Redding died in a
firestorm and we want to put him together again somehow.
LVII
I thought it was night but found out the windows were painted
black and a bluebird bigger than a child’s head was singing.
When we get out of Nam the pilot said we’ll go down to S.A.
and kick the shit outta those commie greasers. Of course.
In sleepwalking all year long I grew cataracts, white-haired,
flesh fattened, texture of mushrooms, whistled notes at moon.
After seven hours of television and a quart of vodka he wept
over the National Anthem. O America Carcinoma the eagle dead.
Celebrate her with psalms and new songs – she’ll be fifteen
tomorrow, a classic beauty who won’t trouble her mind with poems.
I wanted to drag a few words out of silence then sleep and none
were what I truly wanted. So much silence and so many words.
LVIII
These losses are final – you walked out of the grape arbor
and are never to be seen again and you aren’t aware of it.
I set off after the grail seven years ago but like a spiral
from above these circles narrow, tighten into a single point.
Let’s forgive her for her Chinese-checker brain and the pills
that charge it electrically. She’s pulled the switch too often.
After the country dance in the yellow Buick Dynaflow with
leather seats we thought Ferlin Husky was singing to us.
A bottle of Corbys won you. A decade later on hearing
I was a poet you laughed. You are permanently coarsened.
Catherine near the lake is a tale I’m telling – a whiff
of lilac and a girl bleeds through her eyes like a pigeon.
LIX
On the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost I rose early
and went fishing where I saw an osprey eat a bass in a tree.
We are not all guilty for anything. Let all stupefied
Calvinists take pleasure in sweet dirty pictures and
gin.
As an active farmer I’m concerned. Apollinaire fertilizer
won’t feed the pigs or chickens. Year of my seventh failure.
When we awoke the music was faint and a golden light came
through the window, one fly buzzed, she whispered another’s name.
Let me announce I’m not against homosexuality. Now that the air
is clear on this issue you can talk freely Donny Darkeyes.
A home with a heated garage where dad can tinker with his
poetry on a workbench and mom glazes the steamed froth for lunch.
LX
She called from Sundance, Wyoming, and said the posse had
forced her into obscene acts in the motel. Bob was dead.
The horse kicked the man off his feet and the man rolled
screaming in the dirt. The red-haired girl watched it all.
I’ve proclaimed June Carter queen-of-song as she makes me
tremble, tears form, chills come. I go to the tavern and drink.
The father ran away and was found near a highway underpass
near Fallon, Nevada, where he looked for shelter from the rain.
My friend the poet is out there in the West being terrified,
he wants to come home and eat well in New York City.
Daddy is dead and late one night won’t appear on the porch
in his hunting clothes as I’ve long wanted him to. He’s dead.
LXI
Wondering what this new light is, before he died he walked
across the kitchen and said, “My stomach is very cold.”
And this haze, yellowish, covers all this morning, meadow,
orchard, woods. Something bad is happening somewhere to her.
I was ashamed of her Appalachian vulgarity and vaguely askew
teeth, her bad grammar, her wanting to screw more often than I.
It was May wine and the night liquid with dark and fog when
we stopped the car and loved to the sound of frogs in the swamp.
I’m bringing to a stop all my befouled nostalgia about childhood.
My eye was gored out, there was a war and my nickname was pig.
There was an old house that smelled of kerosene and apples
and we hugged in a dark attic, not knowing how to continue.
LXII
He climbed the ladder looking over the wall at the party
given for poets by the Prince of China. Fun was had by all.
A certain gracelessness entered his walk and gestures. A tumor
the size of a chickpea grew into a pink balloon in his brain.
I won’t die in Paris or Jerusalem as planned but by electrocution
when I climb up the windmill to unscrew the shorted yard lights.
Samadhi. When I slept in the woods I awoke before dawn
and drank brandy and listened to the birds until the moon disappeared.
When she married she turned from a beautiful girl into a
useless sow with mud on her breasts and choruses of oinks.
O the bard is sure he loves the moon. And the inanimate moon
loves him back with silences, and moonbeams made of chalk.
LXIII
O well, it was the night of the terrible jackhammer
and she put my exhausted pelt in the closet for a souvenir.
Baalim. Why can only one in seven be saved from them
and live again? They never come in fire but in perfect cold.
Sepulchral pussy. Annabel Lee of the snows – the night’s
too long this time of year to sleep through. Dark edges.
All these songs may be sung to the kazoo and I am not
ashamed, add mongrel’s bark, and the music of duck and pig.
Mab has returned as a giantess. She’s out there: bombs in
fist and false laurel, dressed antigreen in black metal.
From this vantage point I can only think of you in the
barnyard, one-tenth ounce panties and it’s a good vision.
LXIV
That the housefly is guided in flight by a fly brain diminishes
me – there was a time when I didn’t own such thoughts.
You admit then you wouldn’t love me if I were a dog or rabbit,
was legless with truly bad skin. I have no defense. Same to you.
Poetry (that afternoon, of course) came flying through the
treetops, a shuddering pink bird, beshitting itself in flight.
When we were in love in 1956 I thought I would give up Keats
and be in the UAW and you would spend Friday’s check wisely.
Hard rock, acid rock, goofballs, hash, haven’t altered my love
for woodcock and grouse. It is the other way around, Mom.
I resigned. Walked down the steps. Got on the Greyhound bus
and went home only to find it wasn’t what I remembered at all.
LXV
There was a peculiar faint light from low in the east
and a leaf skein that scattered it on the ground where I lay.
I fell into the hidden mine shaft in Keewanaw, emerging
in a year with teeth and eyes of burnished copper, black skin.
What will become of her, what will become of her now that
she’s sold into slavery to an Air Force lieutenant?
I spent the night prophesying to the huge black rock
in the river around which the current boiled and slid.
We’ll have to put a stop to this dying everywhere of young
men. It’s not working out and they won’t come back.
Those poems you wrote won’t raise the dead or stir the
living or open the young girl’s lips to jubilance.
LETTERS TO YESENIN
for J.D.
1973
1
to D.G.
This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin
bought at a Leningrad newsstand – permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me
he stares at nothing; the difference between
a plane crash and a noose adds up to nothing.
And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both
of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing
and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved
in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge
near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity
this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light-year away.
So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose that came
to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!
a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart
it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat
as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose.
2
to Rose
I don’t have any medals. I feel their lack
of weight on my chest. Years ago I was ambitious.
But now it is clear that nothing will happen.
All those poems that made me soar along a foot
from the ground are not so much forgotten as never
read in the first place. They rolled like moons
of light into a puddle and were drowned. Not even
the puddle can be located now.
Yet I am encouraged
by the way you hung yourself, telling me that such
things don’t matter. You, the fabulous poet of
Mother Russia. But still, even now, school girls
hold your dead heart, your poems, in their laps
on hot August afternoons by the river while they wait
for their boyfriends to get out of work or their
lovers to return from the army, their dead pets to
return to life again. To be called to supper. You
have a new life on their laps and can scent their
lavender scent, the cloud of hair that falls
over you, feel their feet trailing in the river,
or hidden in a purse walk the Neva again. Best of all
you are used badly like a bouquet of flowers to make
