by Jim Harrison
say I’ll take that foot and that breast and that thigh and those lips
you have become so denatured and particular. They float and merge
their parts trying to come up with something that will please you.
Selecting the finest belly you write your name with a long thin
line of cocaine but she is perspiring and you can’t properly snort
it off. Disappointments. The belly weeps but you dismiss her, sad
and frightened that your dreams have come to no end. Why cast Robert
Redford in your life story if all that he’s going to do is sit there
and piss and moan at the typewriter for two hours in expensive
Eastman color? Not much will happen if you don’t like to drink
champagne out of shoes. And sated with a half-dozen French meals a day
you long for those simple boiled potatoes your estranged wife made
so perfectly. The letters from your children are defiled in a stack
of fan mail and obscene photos. Your old dog and horse have been
given to kindly people and your wife will soon marry a jolly farmer.
No matter that your million-selling books are cast in bronze. On a
whim you fly to Palm Beach, jump on your yacht and set the automatic.
You fit a nylon hawser around your neck, hurl overboard, and after
the sharks have lunch your head skips in the noose like a marlin bait.
21
To answer some of the questions you might ask were you alive and
had we become friends but what do poets ask one another after long
absence? How have you been other than dead and how have I been
dying on earth without naming the average string of complaints which
is only worrying aloud, naming the dreaded motes that float around
the brain, those pink balloons calling themselves poverty, failure,
sickness, lust, and envy. To mention a very few. But you want part-
iculars, not the human condition or a letter to the editor on why
when I’m at my worst I think I’ve been fucked over. So here’s this
Spring’s news: now that the grass is taller I walk in some fear of
snakes. Feeling melancholy I watched my wife plant the garden row
on row while the baby tried to catch frogs. It’s hard not to eat too
much when you deeply love food but I’ve limited myself to a half
gallon of Burgundy a day. On long walks my eyes are so sunk back
in my brain they see nothing, then move forward again toward the light
and see a high meadow turning pale green and swimming in the fog
with crows tracing perceptible and geometrical paths just above
the fog but audible. At the shore I cast for fish, some of them
large with deliquescing smelt and alewives in their bellies. Other
than marriage I haven’t been in love for years; close calls over
the world I mentioned to you before, but it’s not love if it isn’t
a surprise. I look at women and know deeply they are from another
planet and sometimes even lightly touching a girl’s arm I know
I am touching a lovely though alien creature. We don’t get back
those days we don’t caress, don’t make love. If I could get you out
in the backcountry down in Key West and get some psilocybin into
you you would cut your legendary vodka consumption. Naturally I
still believe in miracles and the holy fate of the imagination. How
is it being dead and would I like it and should I put it off for a while?
22
These last few notes to you have been a bit somber like biographies
of artists written by joyless people so that the whole book is
a record of agony at thirty rather than thirty-three and a third.
You know the sound – Keeeaaattts wuzzz verrry unhappppppy abouttt
dyinnnng. So here are some of those off-the-wall extravagancies.
Dawn in Ecuador with mariachi music, dawn at Ngorongoro with elephant
far below in the crater swaggering through the marsh grass, dawn in
Moscow and snowing with gold minarets shouting that you have at last
reached Asia, dawn in Addis Ababa with a Muslim waver in the cool
air smelling of ginger and a lion roaring on the lawn, dawn in
bleary Paris with a roll tasting like zinc and a girl in a cellophane
blouse staring at you with four miraculous eyes, dawn in Normandy
with a conceivable princess breathing in the next room and horses
wandering across the moat beneath my window, dawn in Montana with
herons calling from the swamp, dawn in Key West wondering if it was
a woman or tarpon that left your bed before cockcrow, dawn at home
when your eyes are molten and the ghost of your dog chases the fox
across the pasture, dawn on the Escanaba with trout dimpling the
mist and the water with a dulcet roar, dawn in London when the party-
girl leaves your taxi to go home to Shakespeare, dawn in Leningrad
with the last linden leaves falling and you knocking at the door
for a drunken talk but I am asleep. Not to speak of the endless and
nearly unconscious water walks after midnight when even the stars
might descend another foot to get closer to earth. Heat. The wetness
of air. Couplings. Even the mosquitoes are lovely and seem to imitate
miniature birds. And a lion’s cough is followed rhythmically by a
hyena’s laugh to prove that nature loves symmetry. The black girl
leaves the grand hotel for her implausibly shabby home. The poet
had dropped five sorts of drugs in his belly swill of alcohol and
has imagined his deathless lines commemorating your last Leningrad night.
23
I want to bother you with some recent nonsense; a classmate dropped
dead, his heart was attacked at thirty-three. At the crematory
they lowered his body by fire-resistant titanium cables reminding
one of the steak on a neglected barbecue grill, only more so. We’re
not supposed to believe that the vase of ashes is the real him.
You can imagine the mighty roar of the gas jets, a train coming
closer, the soul of thunder. But this is only old hat, or old death,
whichever. “Pause here, son of sorrow, remember death,” someone once
said. “We can’t have all things here to please us, our little Sue Ann
is gone to Jesus” reads an Alabama gravestone. But maybe even Robert
Frost or Charles Olson don’t know they are dead. That would include
you of course. It is no quantity, absolute zero, the air in a hole
minus its airiness, the vacuum from the passing bird or bullet, the
end of the stem where the peach was, the place above the ground
where the barn burned with such energy we plugged our ears. If not,
show yourself in ten minutes. Let’s settle this issue because I feel
badly today: a sense that my teeth and body are rotting on the hoof.
I could avoid the whole thing with a few drinks – it’s been over
eight hours – but I want to face it like Simon Magus or poor Faustus.
Nothing, however, presents itself other than that fading picture of
my sister with an engine in her lap, not a very encouraging item
to be sure. I took Anna who is two for her first swim today. We didn’t
know we were going swimming so she wore a pink dress, standing in
the lake up to her waist in wonderment. The gaucheries of children,
the way they love birds and neon lights, kill snakes and eat sand.
But I decided I wanted to go swimming for the first time and wanted
to make love for the first time again. These thoughts can make you
unhappy. Perhaps if your old dog had been in the apartment that night
you wouldn’t have done it. Everything’s so fragile except ropes.
24
Dear friend. It rained long and hard after a hot week and when I
awoke the world was green and leafy again, or as J.D. says, everything
was new like a warm rain after a movie. And I said enough of death
and its obvious health hazards, it’s a white-on-white jigsaw puzzle
in one piece. An hour with the doctor yesterday when he said my
blood pressure was so high I might explode as if I had just swallowed
an especially tasty grenade. I must warn my friends not to stand
too close. Blood can be poisonous; the Kikuyu in Kenya are often
infected when they burrow hacking away in the gut of an elephant.
Some don’t come back. But doctors don’t say such things, except
W.C. Williams. Just like your doctor when you were going batty, mine
said, “You must be distressed, you eat and drink and smoke far too
much. Cut out these things. The lab found lilacs and part of the
backbone of a garter snake or garter in your stool sample, and the
remnants of a hair ball. Do you chew your comb? We are checking to
see if it’s your hair as there are possible criminal questions here.
Meanwhile get this thatch of expensive prescriptions filled and I
advise extensive psychiatric care. I heard your barking when I left
the room. How did you manage gout at your age?” My eyes misted
and I heard fiddle music and I looked up from page 86 in the June
Vogue where my old nemesis Lauren Hutton was staring at me in a
doctor’s office in northern Michigan. This is Paul Bunyan country
Lauren. And how did I get gout? All of that fried salt and side
pork as a child. Humble fare. Quintuple heaps of caviar and decanters
of vodka at the Hotel Europa in Leningrad. Tête de veau, the brains,
tongue and cheeks of a calf. Side orders of tripe à la mode de Caen
sweetbreads with morels. Stewed kidneys and heart. Three-pound steaks
as snacks, five dozen oysters and three lobsters in Boston. A barrel
of nice gravy. Wild boar. Venison. Duck. Partridge. Pig’s feet. But
you know, Sergei, I must eat these magical trifles to keep from
getting brainy and sad, to avoid leaving this physical world.
25
An afterthought to my previous note; we must closely watch any self-
pity and whining. It simply isn’t manly. Better by far to be a cow-
boy drinking rusty water, surviving on the maggots that unwittingly
ate the pemmican in the saddlebags. I would be the Lone and I don’t
need no one said the cowpoke. Just a man and his horse against
everything else on earth and horses are so dumb they run all day
from flies never learning that flies are everywhere. Though in their
violent motion they avoid the flies for a few moments. It’s time
again not to push a metaphor too far. But back again to the success-
ful farmer who has his original hoe bronzed like baby shoes above
the Formica mantelpiece – I earned what I got, nobody give me nothing
he says. Pasternak said you probably didn’t think death was the end
of it all. Maybe you were only checking it out for something new
to write about. We thieves of fire are capable of such arrogance
when not otherwise occupied as real people pretending to be poet
farmers, important writers, capable lovers, sports fops, regular guys,
rock stars with tiny nonetheless appreciative audiences. But the
self-pity and whining must stop. I forgot to add that at the doctor’s
an old woman called in to say that her legs had turned blue and she
couldn’t walk or hold her urine and she was alone. Try that one on.
Thirty years ago I remember my mother singing Hello Central, give
me heaven, I think my daddy is there about the usual little boy in
a wartime situation. We forget about those actual people, certainly
our ancestors and neighbors, who die in earnest. They called my dad,
the county agent, and his friend a poor farmer was swinging like you
only from a rafter in the barn from a hay rope. What to do with his
strange children – their thin bodies, low brows and narrow eyes –
who were my schoolmates. They’re working in auto factories now and
still voiceless. We are different in that we suffer and love, are bored,
with our mouths open and must speak on occasion for those others.
26
Going in the bar last Sunday night I noticed that they were having
high-school graduation down the street. Caps and gowns. June and
mayflies fresh from the channel fluttering in the warm still air.
After a few drinks I felt jealous and wanted someone to say, “Best of
luck in your chosen field” or, “The road of life is ahead of you.”
Remember your first trip to Moscow at nineteen? Everything was pos-
sible. You watched those noblewomen at the riding academy who would
soon be permanently unhorsed, something you were to have mixed
feelings about, what with the way poets suck up to and are attracted
to the aristocracy however gimcrack. And though the great Blok
welcomed you, you felt tentative, an unknown quantity, and remained
so for several years. But how quickly one goes from being unknown
and embarrassed to bored and arrogant, from being ignored to expecting
deference. From fleabag rooms to at least the Plaza. And the daydreams
and hustling, the fantasies and endless work that get you from one
to the other, only to discover that you really want to go home. Start
over with a new deck. But back home all the animals are dead, the
friends have disappeared and the fields gone to weed. The fish
have flown from the creeks and ponds and the birds have all drowned
or gone to China. No one knows you – they have little time for poetry
in the country, or in the city for that matter except for the minis-
trations of a few friends. Your name bobs up like a Halloween
apple and literature people have the vague feeling that they should read
you if they ever “catch up” on their reading. Once on a train I saw
a girl reading a book of mine but she was homely and I had a toothache
so I let the moment pass. What delicious notoriety. The journalist
said I looked like a bricklayer or beer salesman, not being fashion-
ably slender. But lately the sun shines through, the sweet release
of flinging these lines at the dead, almost like my baby Anna throw-
ing grain to the horses a mile away, in the far corner of the pasture.
27
I won my wings! I got all A’s! We bought fresh fruit! The toilet
broke! Thus my life draws fuel ineluctably from triumph. Manic,
rainy June slides into July and I am carefully dressing myself in
primary colors for happiness. When the summer solstice has passed
you know you’re finally safe again. That midnight surely dates
the year. “Look to your romantic interests and business investments,”
says the star hack in the newspapers. But what if you have neither?
Millions will be up to nothing. One of those pure
empty days with
all the presence of a hole in the ground. The stars have stolen
twenty-four hours and vengeance is out of the question. But I’m
a three-peckered purple goat if you were tied to any planet by your
cord. That is mischief, an inferior magic; pulling the lining out
of a top hat. You merely rolled on the ground moaning trying to pull
that mask off but it had grown into your face. “Such a price the
gods exact for song to become what we sing,” said someone. If it
aches that badly you have to take the head off, narrow the neck to
a third its normal size, a practice known as hanging by gift of the
state or as a do-it-yourself project. But what I wonder about is your
velocity: ten years from Ryazan to Leningrad. A little more than
a decade, two years into your fifth seven and on out like a proton
in an accelerator. You simply fell off the edge of the world while
most of us are given circles or, hopefully, spirals. The new
territory had a wall which you went over and on the other side there
was something we weren’t permitted to see. Everyone suspects it’s
nothing. Time will tell. But how you preyed on, longed for, those
first ten years. We’ll have to refuse that, however its freshness
in your hands. Romantic. Fatal. We learn to see with the child’s
delight again or perish. We hope it was your vision you lost,
that before those final minutes you didn’t find out something new.
28
to Robert Duncan
O to use the word wingéd as in bird or victory or airplane for
the first time. Not for spirit though, yours or anyone else’s
or the bird that flew errantly into the car radiator. Or for poems
that sink heavily to our stomachs like fried foods, the powerful
ones, visceral, as impure as the bodies they flaunt. Curious what
you paid for your cocaine to get wingéd. We know the price of
the poems, one body and soul net, one brain already tethered to the
dark, one ingenious leash never to hold a dog, two midwinter eyes
that lost their technicolor. Think what you missed. Mayakovsky’s
