by Jim Harrison
It’s unfortunate for our theory that the same
proportion of rich folks are as pleasant
as poor folks, a pitiless seven
percent, though not necessarily the ones
who still say their prayers and finish
the morning oatmeal to help the poor.
Everyone I have ever met is deeply
puzzled.
II
Up in Michigan poor folks dream of trips
to Hawaii or “Vegas.” They muttered deeply
when the banker won the big lottery –
“It just don’t seem fair,” they said.
Long ago when I was poor
there was something in me that craved
to get fired, to drink a shot and beer
with a lump in my throat, hitchhike
or drive to California in an old car,
tell my family “I’ll write if I get work.”
In California, where you can sleep outside
every night, I saw the Pacific Ocean
and ate my first food of the Orient,
a fifty-cent bowl of noodles and pork.
No more cornmeal mush with salt pork
gravy, no more shovels at dawn,
no more clothes smelling of kerosene,
no more girls wearing ankle bracelets spelling
another’s name. No more three-hour waits
in unemployment lines, or cafeteria catsup
and bread for fifteen cents. I’ve eaten
my last White Tower burger and I’m heading
for the top. Or not. How could I dream
I’d end up moist-eyed in the Beverly Hills Hotel
when I ordered thirteen appetizers for myself
and the wheels of the laden trolley squeaked?
The television in the limousine broke down
and I missed the news on the way to look
at the ocean where there were no waves.
When I went bankrupt I began to notice cemeteries
and wore out my clothes, drank up the wine cellar.
I went to the movies and kissed my wife a lot
for the same reason – they’re both in technicolor.
Everyone I met in those days was deeply puzzled.
III
Now I’ve rubbed rich and poor together
like two grating stones, mixed them temporarily
like oil and vinegar, male and female, until
my interest has waned to nothing. One night I saw
a constellation that chose not to reappear,
drifting in the day into another galaxy.
I tried to ignore the sound of my footsteps
in the woods until I did, and when I swam
in the river I finally forgot it was water,
but I still can’t see a cow without saying cow.
Perhaps this was not meant to be. I dug
a deep hole out in a clearing in the forest
and sat down in it, studying the map
of the sky above me for clues, a new bible.
This is rushing things a bit, I thought.
I became a woman then became a man again.
I hiked during the night alone and gave
my dogs fresh bones until they no longer cared.
I bought drinks for the poor and for myself,
left mail unopened, didn’t speak on the phone,
only listened. I shot the copy machine with my rifle.
No more copies, I thought, everything original!
Now I am trying to unlearn the universe
in the usual increments of nights and days.
Time herself often visits in swirling but gentle clouds.
Way out there on the borders of my consciousness
I’ve caught glimpses of that great dark bird,
the beating of whose wings is death, drawing closer.
How could it be otherwise? I thought.
Down in the hole last August during a thunderstorm
I watched her left wing-tip shudder past
between two lightning strokes. Maybe I’ll see her again
during the northern lights, but then, at that moment,
I was still a child of water and mud.
DANCING
After the passing of irresistible
music you must learn to make
do with a dripping faucet,
rain or sleet on the roof,
eventually snow,
a cat’s sigh,
the spherical notes that float
down from Aldebaran,
your cells as they part,
craving oxygen.
THE IDEA OF BALANCE IS TO BE FOUND IN HERONS AND LOONS
I just heard a loon-call on a TV ad
and my body gave itself
a quite voluntary shudder,
as in the night in East Africa
I heard the immense barking cough
of a lion, so foreign and indifferent.
But the lion drifts away
and the loon stays close,
calling, as she did in my childhood,
in the cold rain a song
that tells the world of men
to keep its distance.
It isn’t the signal of another life
or the reminder of anything
except her call: still,
at this quiet point past midnight
the rain is the same rain
that fell so long ago, and the loon
says I’m seven years old again.
At the far ends of the lake
where no one lives or visits –
there are no roads to get there;
you take the watercourse way,
the quiet drip and drizzle
of oars, slight squeak of oarlock,
the bare feet can feel the cold water
move beneath the old wood boat.
At one end the lordly great blue herons
nest at the top of the white pine;
at the other end the loons,
just after daylight in cream-colored mist,
drifting with wails that begin as querulous,
rising then into the spheres in volume,
with lost or doomed angels imprisoned
within their breasts.
SMALL POEM
There’s something I’ve never known
when I get up in the morning.
Dead children fly off in the shape
of question marks, the doe’s backward
glance at the stillborn fawn.
I don’t know what it is
in the morning, as if incomprehension
beds down with me on waking.
What is the precise emotional temperature
when the young man hangs himself
in the jail cell with his father’s belt?
What is the foot size of the Beast of Belsen?
This man in his overremembered life
needs to know the source of the ache
which is an answer without a question,
his fingers wrapped around the memory
of life, as Cleopatra’s around the snake’s neck,
a shepherd’s crook of love.
COUNTING BIRDS
for Gerald Vizenor
As a child, fresh out of the hospital
with tape covering the left side
of my face, I began to count birds.
At age fifty the sum total is precise
and astonishing, my only secret.
Some men count women or the cars
they’ve owned, their shirts –
long sleeved and short sleeved –
or shoes, but I have my birds,
excluding, of course, those extraordinary
days: the twenty-one thousand
snow geese and sandhill cranes at
Bosque del Apache; the sky blinded
by great frigate birds in the Pacific
off Anconcito, Ecuador; the twenty-o
ne
thousand pink flamingos in Ngorongoro Crater
in Tanzania; the vast flock of seabirds
on the Seri coast of the Sea of Cortez
down in Sonora that left at nightfall,
then reappeared, resuming
their exact positions at dawn;
the one thousand cliff swallows nesting
in the sand cliffs of Pyramid Point,
their small round burrows like eyes,
really the souls of the Anasazi who flew
here a thousand years ago
to wait the coming of the Manitou.
And then there were the usual, almost deadly
birds of the soul – the crow with silver
harness I rode one night as if she
were a black, feathered angel;
the birds I became to escape unfortunate
circumstances – how the skin ached
as the feathers shot out toward light;
the thousand birds the dogs helped
me shoot to become a bird (grouse, woodcock,
duck, dove, snipe, pheasant, prairie chicken, etc.).
On my deathbed I’ll write this secret
number on a slip of paper and pass
it to my wife and two daughters.
It will be a hot evening in late June
and they might be glancing out the window
at the thunderstorm’s approach from the west.
Looking past their eyes and a dead fly
on the window screen I’ll wonder
if there’s a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.
O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud,
into the marvel of this final night.
AFTER IKKYŪ & OTHER POEMS
for Jack Turner
1996
PREFACE
I began my Zen studies and practice well over twenty years ago in a state of rapacious and self-congratulatory spiritual greed. I immediately set about reading hundreds of books on the subject, almost all contemporary and informed by an earnest mediocrity. There was no more self-referential organism alive than myself, a potato that didn’t know it was a potato.
Naturally the years have passed quickly, if not brutishly. I practiced because I value life and this seems the best way for me to get at the heart of the matter. We are more than dying flies in a shithouse, though we are that, too. There are hundreds of ways to tip off a cushion and only one way to sit there. Zen is the vehicle of reality, and I see almost as much of it in Wordsworth as I do in Ch’an texts. As I’ve said before, it’s easy to mistake the plumbing for the river. We in the West are prone to ignore our own literary traditions, while in the East Zennists were industriously syncretic, gathering poetry, Confucius, and Taoism to their breasts. There is scarcely a better koan than Ahab before the whiteness of a whale who sees a different ocean from each side of its massive head.
The sequence “After Ikkyū” was occasioned when Jack Turner passed along to me The Record of Tung-shan and the new Master Yunmen, edited by Urs App. It was a dark period, and I spent a great deal of time with the books. They rattled me loose from the oppressive, poleaxed state of distraction we count as worldly success. But then we are not fueled by piths and gists but by practice – which is Yunmen’s unshakable point, amongst a thousand other harrowing ones. I was born a baby, what are these hundred suits of clothes I’m wearing?
Of course, the reader should be mindful that I’m a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less. I do not remotely consider myself a “Zen Buddhist,” as that is too ineptly convenient, and a specific barrier for one whose lifelong obsession has been his art rather than his religion. Someone like Robert Aitken Roshi is a Zen Buddhist. I’m still a fool. Early on in my teens I suffocated myself with Protestant theology and am mindful, in Coleridge’s terms, that, like spiders, we spin webs of deceit out of our big hanging asses, whether with Jesus or the Buddha.
But still practice is accretive, and who has opened doors for me like Zen creatures – Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Kobun Chino Sensei, Bob Watkins, Dan Gerber, and Jack Turner, to name a few prominent ones?
It doesn’t really matter if these poems are thought of as slightly soiled dharma gates or just plain poems. They’ll live or die by their own specific density, flowers for the void. The poems were written within the discreet interval described so poignantly by Tung-shan:
Earnestly avoid seeking without,
Lest it recede far from you.
Today I am walking alone,
Yet everywhere I meet him.
He is now no other than myself,
But I am not now him.
It must be understood this way
In order to merge with Suchness.
To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime.
–J.H.
1996
AFTER IKKYŪ
1
Our minds buzz like bees
but not the bees’ minds.
It’s just wings not heart
they say, moving to another flower.
2
The well pit is beneath where the pump shed burned
years ago with a living roar, a fire lion. Down
in the pit, charred timbers, green grass, one burdock,
a vernal pool where frogs live trapped in a universe.
3
I’ve wasted too much moonlight.
Breast-beating. I’ll waste no more moonlight,
the moon bullied by clouds drifts west
in her imponderable arc, snared for a half
hour among the wet leaves in the birdbath.
4
After thirty years of work
I take three months off
and wait for the mirror’s image to fade.
These chess pieces, slippery with blood.
5
Time eats us alive.
On my birthday yesterday
I was only one day older
though I began ten million eons ago
as a single cell in the old mud homestead.
6
Shoju sat all night in the graveyard
among wolves who sniffed his Adam’s apple.
First light moving in the air
he arose, peed, and ate breakfast.
7
With each shot
he killed the self
until there was no one left
to bring home the bacon.
8
One part of the brain attacks another,
seven parts attack nine parts,
then the war begins to subside
from lack of ammunition,
but out there I know the mules are bringing
fresh supplies from over the mountain.
9
Poor little blind boy lost in the storm,
where should he go to be without harm?
For starters, the dickhead should get a life.
Once I had a moment of absolute balance
while dancing with my sick infant daughter
to Merle Haggard. The blind boy died in the storm
with fresh frozen laughter hot on his lips.
10
Our pup is gravely ill.
She’s her own pup too,
first in her own line.
How great thou art o god,
save her, please, the same cry
in every throat. May I live forever.
11
At Hard Luck Ranch the tea is hot,
the sky’s dark blue. Behind me
the jaguar skin from the jaguar
who died so long ago from a bullet
while perched on a calf’s back
tells me the same old story.
12
Not here and now but now and here.
If you don’t know the difference
is a matter of life and death, get down
naked on bare knees in the snow
and study the ticking of your watch.
13
The hound I’ve known for three years
trots down the mountain road
with a nod at me, pretending he knows
what he’s doing miles from home
on a sunlit morning. He’s headed
for a kind of place he hasn’t quite found yet
and might not recognize when he gets there.
14
At the strip club in Lincoln, Nebraska,
she said, “I’m the Princess of Shalimar.”
Doubtless, I thought, at a loss for words
but not images, the air moist but without
the promise of a rain. She’s not bending
pinkly like a pretzel but a body.
At this age, my first bona fide royalty.
15
Way up a sandy draw in the foothills
of the Whetstone Mountains I found cougar
tracks so fresh, damp sand was still
trickling in from the edges. For some reason
I knelt and sniffed them, quite sure
I was being watched by a living rock
in the vast, heat-blurred landscape.
16
I went to Tucson and it gave
me a headache. I don’t know how.
Everyone’s a cousin in this world.
