by Jim Harrison
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for Will Hearst
Life never answers.
It has no ears and doesn’t hear us;
it doesn’t speak, it has no tongue.
It neither goes nor stays:
we are the ones who speak,
the ones who go,
while we hear from echo to echo, year to year,
our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.
That which we call life
hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues,
and through us, knows itself.
Octavio Paz, from “Response and Reconciliation,” translated
by Eliot Weinberger
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Broom
Notation
American Sermon
Arts
Bird’s-Eye View
Poet Warning
A Part of My History
The Muse in Our Time
Muse II
Poet at Nineteen in NYC
Sister
Skull
Horses
René Char II
Xmas Cheeseburgers
Mary the Drug Addict
Night Creatures
Deaf Dog’s Bark
June the Horse
Poet No. 7
A Puzzle
Rumination
Dan’s Bugs
Invisible
Mary
Remote Friends
Poet Science
Ache
Oriole
Blue Shawl
River I
River II
River III
River IV
River V
River VI
River VII
Spring
Sky
March in Patagonia, AZ
Brazil
Grand Marais
Desert Snow
Reality
She
Love
Back into Memory
Debtors
Prisoners
Corruption
Our Anniversary
Doors
Greed
Cereal
D.B.
Sunlight
Brutish
Nightfears
Blue
The Current Poor
Moping
Church
Chatter
Return
Prado
Death Again
Suite of Unreason
About the Author
Books by Jim Harrison
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
BROOM
To remember you’re alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you’ve made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone’s inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.
Now to home without looking back,
enough is enough.
En route buy the best wine
you can aff ord and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and begin sweeping.
Sweep until the walls are
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
until the floor disappears. Finish the wine
in this field of air, return to the cemetery
in evening and wind through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.
NOTATION
They say the years are layers, laminae.
They lie. Our minds aren’t stuck together
like trees. We’re much nearer to a ball of snakes
in winter, a flock of blackbirds, a school of fish.
Your brain guides you away from sentences.
It is consoled by the odor of the chokecherry tree
that drifts its sweetness through the studio window.
Chokecherry trees have always been there
along with crab apples. The brain doesn’t care
about layers. It is both vertical and horizontal
in a split second, in all directions at once.
Nearly everything we are taught is false
except how to read. All these poems that drift
upward in our free-floating minds hang there
like stationary birds with a few astonishing
girls and women. Einstein lights a cigarette
and travels beyond the galaxies that have
no layers. Our neurons are designed after 90 billion galaxies.
As a shattered teenager I struggled to paint
a copy of El Greco’s View of Toledo to Berlioz’s Requiem.
The canvas was too short but very deep. I walked
on my knees to see what the world looked like
to Toulouse-Lautrec. It didn’t work. I became seven
again. It was World War II. I was about
to lose an eye. The future was still in the sky
above me, which I had to learn to capture
in the years that never learned as clouds
to be layered. First warm day. Chokecherry burst. Its song.
AMERICAN SERMON
I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the girl on the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.
ARTS
&
nbsp; It’s better to start walking before you’re born.
As with dancing you have to learn the steps
and after that free-form can be the best.
Stevens said technique is the proof of seriousness,
though the grace of a Maserati is limited to itself.
There is a human wildness held beneath the skin
that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.
I can’t walk in the shoes cobbled for me.
They weren’t devised by poets but by shoemakers.
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
In the Sandhills of Nebraska
the towns are mere islands, sandspits,
in the ocean of land while in the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan, the towns seem not very successful
attempts to hold back the forest. In Montana
the mountains are so dominant that some days
the people refuse to look at them as children
turn away from the fathers who beat them.
But of course in most places the people
have won, the cities and highways have won.
As in nearly all wars both sides have lost
and the damage follows until the end of our time.
It seems strange that it could have been done well.
Greed has always fouled our vast nest.
Tiring of language, the mind takes flight
swimming off into the ocean of air thinking
who am I that the gods and men have disappointed me?
You walk through doorways in the mind you can’t walk out
then one day you discover that you’ve learned to fly.
From up here the water is still blue, the grass green
and the wind that buoys me is 12 billion years old.
POET WARNING
He went to sea
in a thimble of poetry
without sail or oars
or anchor. What chance
do I have, he thought?
Hundreds of thousands
of moons have drowned out here
and there are no gravestones.
A PART OF MY HISTORY
I took the train from Seville to Granada with a vintner friend. I had been reading Federico García Lorca for over fifty years and needed to see where he was murdered on the mountainside near Granada. Beware old man! We visited the site of the murder, drank a little wine, and I began to drown in melancholy. We went to our hotel where I planned to stay in Lorca’s room but it frightened me and I moved to another. We toured the city in the morning and I stared at the Sierra Nevada glistening with snow that was somehow somber as the jewelry of the dead. I took a nap and wept for no reason. We went to a magnificent flamenco concert on a hill across from the Alhambra and ate very late in the evening. I became quite ill. My friend had to leave for her home in Collioure. I spent the day reading my empty journal, the white pages swarming with nothing. At 5 a.m. I went to an airport hours away in the darkness, flew to Madrid, then from Madrid to Chicago sitting next to a girl of surpassing beauty who said that she was an Erasmus scholar, an honor of sorts. I slept for eight hours and dreamt that Erasmus was a girl. At a Chicago airport hotel I thought I was slipping away and was taken to a hospital in an ambulance and my journal was crushed in my pocket. I stayed in ER for seven hours and a Chinese magician restored me. At dawn I flew to Montana and barely recognized our dog. My advice is, do not try to inhabit another’s soul. You have your own.
THE MUSE IN OUR TIME
We were born short boys in tall grass.
We became the magicians who actually
sawed the girl in half. We were prosecuted
unfairly by the gods for this simple mistake
and exiled to the tropics where we wore
the masques of howler monkeys
until we became howler monkeys
in the fabulous zoo of our culture.
Now as an amateur surgeon I’m putting
the girl back together stitch by painful stitch
beside the creek in the winter twilight.
She begs me to stop. She wants to become
a night-blooming cereus only seen
every decade or so in the random dark.
MUSE II
Pretty girls most often have pretty
parents but then for unknown genetic
reasons a beautiful woman is born
of homely parents. She is not happy
about being set aside by the gods.
At family gatherings truly ugly relatives
want to murder her but this is rarely
done in poetry since William Shakespeare.
Out in the orchard she is buggered
nearly to death by her cousins who all
become scientists who devise products
we never imagined we would need.
She is sent into the world. She crawls
into the low door of the city but yearns
to stand straight. She floats up a river
into the country and lives with wild dogs
who are soon hunted to death for sport.
She wants to step off the world but can’t find
the edge. A man flies her to Mexico
and makes her a prostitute. She escapes
but a pimp slashes her face, a happy
moment because now she’s not beautiful.
She walks twenty miles down an empty beach
and lives with an old, deaf fisherman.
Now her soul swells with the grandeur of the ocean,
the beauty of fish, the silence of man,
the moon and stars she finally understands.
POET AT NINETEEN IN NYC
The poet looking for an immortal poem
from his usual pathetic position as a graduate
student in a university that doesn’t exist.
He knows three constellations, this expert
of the stars, and sometimes notices the moon
by the time it reaches its first quarter.
He’s admirable and keeps his chin high
in the city’s arctic winds. He drinks
a hundred drinks a month, three a day
and a bit more for courage. He has a room
and a half, the half a tiny kitchenette,
and his table for writing and eating
is a piece of plywood he places on the bed.
Tacked above the bed are pictures of his heroes,
Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Lorca and Faulkner,
and of course Rimbaud. He doesn’t fear rejection
because he keeps his work to himself. He thinks
he’s as inevitable as a river but doesn’t have time
to keep time. The hardest part is when the river
is too swift and goes underground for days on end.
SISTER
I wanted to play a song for you
on our old $28 phonograph
from 1954 but the needle is missing
and they no longer make the needles.
It is the work of man to make a voice
a needle. You were buried at nineteen
in wood with Daddy. I’ve spent a lifetime
trying to learn the language of the dead.
The musical chatter of the tiny yellow finches
in the front yard comes closest. It’s midnight
and I’m giving my nightly rub to the dog’s
tummy, something she truly depends on.
Maybe you drifted upward as an ancient
bird hoping to nest on the moon.
SKULL
You can’t write the clear biography
of the aches and pains inside your skull.
Will I outlive my passport expiration?
Will the knots of the past beat me to death
like limber clubs, the Gordian knots
that never will be untied, big as bowling balls?
Maybe not. Each time I row the river
for six hours or so the innards
of my skull
slightly change shape. Left alone knots
can unravel in the turbulence of water.
It isn’t for me to understand why loved ones
died. My skull can’t withstand
the Tao of the mighty river carrying me along
as if I were still and the mountains
capped by clouds were rushing past.
After we submerge do we rise again in another form?
Meanwhile I speculate on the seven pills
I must take each day to stay alive.
I ask each one, “Are we doing your job?”
The only answer I’ve found is the moving
water whose music is without a single lyric.
HORSES
In truth I am puzzled most in life
by nine horses.
I’ve been watching them for eleven weeks
in a pasture near Melrose.
Two are on one side of the fence and seven
on the other side.
They stare at one another from the same places
hours and hours each day.
This is another unanswerable question
to haunt us with the ordinary.
They have to be talking to one another
in a language without a voice.
Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,
sullen, melancholy, jubilant.
Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables
before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.
We live far out in the country where I hear
creature voices night and day.
Like us they are talking about their lives
on this brief visit to earth.
