by Jim Harrison
to Corsica, to return to Costa Rica,
but I couldn’t escape the suicidal house
until May when I drove
through the snow to reach the river.
On the bank by the spring creek
my shadow seemed to leap
up to gather me, or it leapt
up to gather me, not seeming so
but as a natural fact. Faulkner said
that the drowned man’s shadow had watched
him from the river all the time.
Drowning in the bourgeois trough,
a bourride or gruel of money, drugs,
whiskey, hotels, the dream coasts,
ass in the air at the trough, drowning
in a river of pus, pus of civilization,
pus of cities, unholy river of shit,
of filth, shit of nightmares, shit
of skewed dreams and swallowed years.
The river pulls me out,
draws me elsewhere
and down to blue water,
green water,
black water.
How far between the Virgin
and the Garrison and back?
Why is it a hundred times farther to get back,
the return upriver in the dark?
It isn’t innocence, but to win back breath,
body heat, the light that gathers around
a waking animal. Ten years ago I saw
the dancing Virgin in a basement
in New York, a whirl of hot color
from floor to ceiling, whirling in a dance.
At eighteen in New York
on Grove Street I discovered
red wine, garlic, Rimbaud,
and a red-haired girl. Livid colors
not known in farm country,
also Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins,
the odors from restaurant vents,
thirty-five-cent Italian sausages
on Macdougal, and the Hudson River:
days of river-watching and trying
to get on a boat for the tropics and see
that Great Ocean river, the Gulf Stream.
Another fifteen years before I saw
the Ocean river and the sharks hanging
under the sargassum weed lines,
a blue river in green water,
and the sharks staring back, sinking
down listlessly into darker water;
the torpor of heat, a hundred low-tide
nights begging a forgetfulness
I haven’t quite earned.
I forgot where I heard that poems
are designed to waken sleeping gods;
in our time they’ve taken on nearly
unrecognizable shapes as gods will do;
one is a dog, one is a scarecrow
that doesn’t work – crows perch
on the wind-whipped sleeves,
one is a carpenter who doesn’t become Jesus,
one is a girl who went to heaven
sixty years early. Gods die,
and not always out of choice,
like near-sighted cats jumping
between buildings seven stories up.
One god drew feathers out of my skin
so I could fly, a favor close to terror.
But this isn’t a map of the gods.
When they live in rivers
it’s because rivers have no equilibrium;
gods resent equilibrium when everything
that lives moves; boulders
are a war of atoms, and the dandelion
cracks upward through the blacktop road.
Seltzer’s tropical beetle grew
from a larval lump in a man’s arm,
emerging full grown, pincers waving.
On Mt. Cuchama there were so many
gods passing through I hid in a hole
in a rock, waking one by accident.
I fled with a tight ass and cold skin.
I could draw a map of this place
but they’re never caught in the same location
twice. And their voices change from involuntary
screams to the singular wail of the loon,
possibly the wind that can howl down Wall St.
Gods have long abandoned the banality of war
though they were stirred by a hundred-year-old
guitarist I heard in Brazil, also the autistic child
at the piano. We’ll be greeted at death
so why should I wait? Today I invoked
any available god back in the woods in the fog.
The world was white with last week’s melting
blizzard, the fog drifting upward, then descending.
The only sound was a porcupine eating bark
off an old tree, and a rivulet beneath the snow.
Sometimes the obvious is true: the full
moon on her bare bottom by the river!
For the gay, the full moon on the lover’s prick!
Gods laugh at the fiction of gender.
Water-gods, moon-gods, god-fever,
sun-gods, fire-gods, give this earth-diver
more songs before I die.
A “system” suggests the cutting off,
i.e., in channel morphology, the reduction,
the suppression of texture to simplify:
to understand a man, or woman, growing
old with eagerness you first consider
the sensuality of death, an unacknowledged
surprise to most. In nature the physiology
has heat and color, beast and tree
saying aloud the wonder of death;
to study rivers, including the postcard
waterfalls, is to adopt another life;
a limited life attaches itself to the endless
movement, the renowned underground
rivers of South America which I’ve felt
thundering far beneath my feet – to die
is to descend into such rivers and flow
along in the perfect dark. But above ground
I’m memorizing life, from the winter moon
to the sound of my exhaustion in March
when all the sodden plans have collapsed
and only daughters, the dogs and cats
keep one from disappearing at gunpoint.
I brought myself here and stare nose to nose
at the tolerant cat who laps whiskey
from my mustache. Life often shatters
in schizoid splinters. I will avoid
becoming the cold stone wall I am straddling.
I had forgot what it was I liked
about life. I hear if you own a chimpanzee
they cease at a point to be funny. Writers
and politicians share an embarrassed moment
when they are sure all problems will disappear
if you get the language right.
That’s not all they share – in each other’s
company they are like boys who have been
discovered at wiener-play in the toilet.
At worst, it’s the gift of gab.
At best it’s Martin Luther King and Rimbaud.
Bearing down hard on love and death
there is an equal and opposite reaction.
All these years they have split the pie,
leaving the topping for the preachers
who don’t want folks to fuck or eat.
What kind of magic, or rite of fertility,
to transcend this shit-soaked stew?
The river is as far as I can move
from the world of numbers: I’m all
for full retreats, escapes, a 47 yr. old runaway.
“Gettin’ too old to run away,” I wrote
but not quite believing this option is gray.
I stare into the deepest pool of the river
which holds the mystery of a cellar to a child,
and think of those two-track roads that dwindle
/>
into nothing in the forest. I have this feeling
of walking around for days with the wind
knocked out of me. In the cellar was a root
cellar where we stored potatoes, apples, carrots
and where a family of harmless blacksnakes lived.
In certain rivers there are pools a hundred
foot deep. In a swamp I must keep secret
there is a deep boiling spring around which
in the dog days of August large brook trout
swim and feed. An adult can speak dreams
to children saying that there is a spring
that goes down to the center of the earth.
Maybe there is. Next summer I’m designing
and building a small river about seventy-seven
foot long. It will flow both ways, in reverse
of nature. I will build a dam and blow it up.
The involuntary image that sweeps
into the mind, irresistible and without evident
cause as a dream or thunderstorm,
or rising to the surface from childhood,
the longest journey taken in a split second,
from there to now, without pause:
in the woods with Mary Cooper, my first love
wearing a violet scarf in May. We’re
looking after her huge mongoloid aunt,
trailing after this woman who loves us
but so dimly perceives the world. We pick
and clean wild leeks for her. The creek
is wild and dangerous with the last
of the snowmelt. The child-woman
tries to enter the creek and we tackle her.
She’s stronger, then slowly understands,
half-wet and muddy. She kisses me
while Mary laughs, then Mary kisses me
over and over. Now I see the pools
in the Mongol eyes that watch and smile
with delight and hear the roar of the creek,
smell the scent of leeks on her muddy lips.
This is an obscene koan set plumb
in the middle of the Occident:
the man with three hands lacks symmetry
but claps the loudest, the chicken
in circles on the sideless road, a plane
that takes off and can never land.
I am not quite alert enough to live.
The fallen nest and fire in the closet,
my world without guardrails, the electric
noose, the puddle that had no bottom.
The fish in underground rivers are white
and blind as the porpoises who live far up
the muddy Amazon. In New York and LA
you don’t want to see, hear, smell,
and you only open your mouth in restaurants.
At night you touch people with rock-hard skins.
I’m trying to become alert enough to live.
Yesterday after the blizzard I hiked far back
in a new swamp and found an iceless
pond connected to the river by a small creek.
Against deep white snow and black trees
there was a sulfurous fumarole, rank and sharp
in cold air. The water bubbled up brown,
then spread in turquoise to deep black,
without the track of a single mammal to drink.
This was nature’s own, a beauty too strong
for life; a place to drown not live.
On waking after the accident
I was presented with the “whole picture”
as they say, magnificently detailed,
a child’s diorama of what life appears to be:
staring at the picture I became drowsy
with relief when I noticed a yellow
dot of light in the lower right-hand corner.
I unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled
to the picture, with an eyeball to the dot
of light, which turned out to be a miniature
tunnel at the end of which I could see
mountains and stars whirling and tumbling,
sheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside-
down lakes, herds of unknown mammals, birds
shedding feathers and regrowing them instantly,
snakes with feathered heads eating their own
shed skins, fish swimming straight up,
the bottom of Isaiah’s robe, live whales
on dry ground, lions drinking from a golden
bowl of milk, the rush of night,
and somewhere in this the murmur of gods –
a tree-rubbing-tree music, a sweet howl
of water and rock-grating-rock, fire
hissing from fissures, the moon settled
comfortably on the ground, beginning to roll.
KOBUN
Hotei didn’t need a zafu,
saying that his ass was sufficient.
The head’s a cloud anchor
that the feet must follow.
Travel light, he said,
or don’t travel at all.
LOOKING FORWARD TO AGE
I will walk down to a marina
on a hot day and not go out to sea.
I will go to bed and get up early,
and carry too much cash in my wallet.
On Memorial Day I will visit the graves
of all those who died in my novels.
If I have become famous I’ll wear a green
janitor’s suit and row a wooden boat.
From a key ring on my belt will hang
thirty-three keys that open no doors.
Perhaps I’ll take all of my grandchildren
to Disneyland in a camper but probably not.
One day standing in a river with my fly rod
I’ll have the courage to admit my life.
In a one-room cabin at night I’ll consign
photos, all tentative memories to the fire.
And you my loves, few as there have been, let’s lie
and say it could never have been otherwise.
So that: we may glide off in peace, not howling
like orphans in this endless century of war.
HOMILY
These simple rules to live within – a black
pen at night, a gold pen in daylight,
avoid blue food and ten-ounce shots
of whiskey, don’t point a gun at yourself,
don’t snipe with the cri-cri-cri of a becassine,
don’t use gas for starter fluid, don’t read
dirty magazines in front of stewardesses –
it happens all the time; it’s time to stop
cleaning your plate, forget the birthdays
of the dead, give all you can to the poor.
This might go on and on and will: who can
choose between the animal in the road
and the ditch? A magnum for lunch
is a little too much but not enough
for dinner. Polish the actual stars at night
as an invisible man pets a dog, an actual
man a memory-dog lost under
the morning glory trellis forty years ago.
Dance with yourself with all your heart
and soul, and occasionally others, but don’t
eat all the berries birds eat or you’ll die.
Kiss yourself in the mirror but don’t fall in love
with photos of ladies in magazines. Don’t fall
in love as if you were falling through
the floor in an abandoned house, or off
a dock at night, or down a crevasse
covered with false snow, a cow floundering
in quicksand while the other cows watch
without particular interest, backward
off a crumbling cornice. Don’t fall in love
with two at once. From the ceiling you can see
this circle of three, though one might be elsewhere.
&
nbsp; He is rended, he rends himself, he dances,
he whirls so hard everything he is flies off.
He crumples as paper but rises daily from the dead.
SOUTHERN CROSS
That hot desert beach in Ecuador,
with scarcely a splotch of vegetation
fronting as it does
a Pacific so immensely lush
it hurls lobsters on great flat
boulders where children brave fatal
waves to pick them up.
Turning from one to the other quickly,
it is incomprehensible: from wild, gray
sunblasted burro eating cactus to azure
immensity of ocean, from miniature
goat dead on infantile feet in sand
to imponderable roar of swells, equatorial sun;
music that squeezes the blood out of the heart
by midnight, and girls whose legs
glisten with sweat, their teeth white
as Canadian snow, legs pounding as plump
brown pistons, and night noises I’ve
never heard, though at the coolest period
in these latitudes, near the faintest
beginning of dawn, there was the cold
unmistakable machine gun, the harshest
chatter death can make. Only then do
I think of my very distant relative, Lorca,
that precocious skeleton, as he crumpled
earthward against brown pine needles;
and the sky, vaster than the Pacific,
whirled overhead, a sky without birds or clouds,
azul te quiero azul.
SULLIVAN POEM
March 5: first day without a fire.
Too early. Too early. Too early!
Take joy in the day
without consideration, the three
newly-brought-to-life bugs
who are not meant to know
what they are doing avoid each other
on windows stained
by a dozen storms.
We eat our father’s food:
herring, beans, salt pork,
sauerkraut, pig hocks, salt cod.
I have said good-bye with one thousand
laments so that even the heart of the rose
becomes empty as my dog’s rubber ball.
The dead are not meant to go,
but to trail off so that one can
see them on a distant hillock,
across the river, in dreams
from which one awakens nearly healed:
