Songs of Unreason

by Jim Harrison

In truth each day is a universe in which

  we are tangled in the light of stars.

  Stop a moment. Think about these horses

  in their sweet-smelling silence.

  RENÉ CHAR II

  What are these legitimate fruits

  of daring?

  The natural brain, bruised by mental

  somersaults.

  On a bet to sleep naked

  out in the snow.

  To push your forefingers into your ears

  until they meet the brain.

  To climb backwards into the heavens because

  we poets live in reverse.

  It is too late to seduce the heroine

  in my stories.

  How can enough be enough

  when it isn’t?

  The Great Mother has no ears and hallelujah

  is the most impossible word in the language.

  I can only say it to birds, fish, and dogs.

  XMAS CHEESEBURGERS

  I was without Christmas spirit

  so I made three cow dogs,

  Lola and Blacky and Pinto,

  cheeseburgers with ground chuck

  and French St. André cheese

  so that we’d all feel better.

  I delivered them to Hard Luck Ranch

  and said, “Chew each bite 32 times.”

  They ignored me and gobbled.

  The world that used to nurse us

  now keeps shouting inane instructions.

  That’s why I ran to the woods.

  MARY THE DRUG ADDICT

  Mary, spayed early so a virgin like her ancient namesake, is a drug addict. She was stomped on as a puppy by an angry little girl and thus a lifetime of spinal problems. Now an old woman she waits for her pain pills every day and then she’s a merry animal. Up until a few years back she’d run much farther than her Lab sister until she was a tiny black peppercorn in the alfalfa field. She walks much closer now turning to check if I’m following along. She’s an English cocker and sniff s the ground then pauses to meditate on the scent. To understand Mary we have to descend into the cellar, the foundation of our being, the animal bodies we largely ignore. She sleeps a lot, eats kibble without interest and craves meat tidbits with the pleasure making her wiggle. Outdoors, her eyes wide to the open she acts with exuberance, our lost birthright. Like all beautiful women she has become beautifully homely. In the evening I lift her onto the couch despite her brush with a skunk, and we speak a bone-deep language without nouns and verbs, a creature-language skin to skin.

  NIGHT CREATURES

  “The horses run around, their feet

  are on the ground.” In my headlights

  there are nine running down the highway,

  clack-clacking in the night, swerving

  and drifting, some floating down the ditch,

  two grays, the rest colorless in the dark.

  What can I do for them? Nothing, night

  is swallowing all of us, the fences

  on each side have us trapped,

  the fences tight to the ditches. Suddenly they turn.

  I stop. They come back toward me,

  my window open to the glorious smell of horses.

  I’m asking the gods to see them home.

  DEAF DOG’S BARK

  A bit flinty. Trace of a squeak.

  Does she hear herself?

  “I hear only my own music,” said Beethoven.

  Is it an announcement or warning

  from one so small and crippled

  in youth by a child

  who stomped her spine?

  She listens to the glory of her past.

  She knows where she is

  in our home. She’s Mary,

  the deer chaser, a woman

  of power, a lion in her mind,

  roaring so weakly into the dark,

  trying to make hips follow chest.

  JUNE THE HORSE

  Sleep is water. I’m an old man surging

  upriver on the back of my dream horse

  that I haven’t seen since I was ten.

  We’re night riders through cities, forests, fields.

  I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora’s Box

  on Sheridan Square in 1957. She’d never spoken

  to me but this time, as a horse lover, she waved.

  I saw the sow bear and two cubs. She growled

  at me in 1987 when I tried to leave the cabin while her cubs

  were playing with my garbage cans. I needed a drink

  but I didn’t need this big girl on my ass.

  We swam up the Neva in St. Petersburg in 1972

  where a girl sat on the bank hugging a red icon

  and Raskolnikov, pissed off and whining, spat on her feet.

  On the Rhône in the Camargue fighting bulls

  bellowed at us from a marsh and 10,000 flamingos

  took flight for Africa.

  This night-riding is the finest thing I do at age seventy-two.

  On my birthday evening we’ll return to the original

  pasture where we met and where she emerged from the pond

  draped in lily pads and a coat of green algae.

  We were children together and I never expected her return.

  One day as a brown boy I shot a wasp nest with bow and arrow,

  releasing hell. I mounted her from a stump and without

  reins or saddle we rode to a clear lake where the bottom

  was covered with my dreams waiting to be born.

  One day I’ll ride her as a bone-clacking skeleton.

  We’ll ride to Veracruz and arcelona, the up toVenus.

  POET NO. 7

  We must be bareback riders. The gods

  abhor halters and stirrups, even a horse

  blanket to protect our asses is forbidden.

  Finally, our legs must grow into the horse

  because we were never meant to get off.

  A PUZZLE

  I see today that everyone on earth

  wants the answer to the same question

  but none has the language to ask it.

  The inconceivable is clearly the inconceivable.

  Bum mutter, teethchatter, brain flotsam,

  we float up from our own depths

  to the sky not the heavens, an invention

  of the murderers. Dogs know the answer

  by never asking the question but can’t advise us.

  Here is the brain that outran the finish line:

  on a dark day when the world was slate

  the yellow sun blasted the mountain across

  the river so that it flung its granitic light

  in the four directions to which we must bow.

  Life doesn’t strangle on ironies, we made

  that part up. Close after dawn the sheep next door

  leave their compound, returning at twilight.

  With the rains this was a prodigious green year,

  and now the decay of autumn sleeps in dead comfort.

  Words are moving water — muddy, clear, or both.

  RUMINATION

  I sit up late dumb as a cow,

  which is to say

  somewhat conscious with thirst

  and hunger, an eye for the new moon

  and the morning’s long walk

  to the water tank. Everywhere

  around me the birds are waiting

  for the light. In this world of dreams

  don’t let the clock cut up

  your life in pieces.

  DAN’S BUGS

  I felt a little bad about the nasty earwig

  that drowned in my nighttime glass of water,

  lying prone at the bottom like a shipwrecked mariner.

  There was guilt about the moth who died

  when she showered with me, possibly a female.

  They communicate through wing vibrations.

  I was careful when sticking a letter

  in our rural mailbox
, waiting for a fly to escape,

  not wanting her to be trapped there in the darkness.

  Out here in the country many insects invade our lives

  and many die in my nightcap, floating and deranged.

  On the way to town to buy wine and a chicken

  I stopped from 70 mph to pick up

  a wounded dragonfly fluttering on the yellow line.

  I’ve read that some insects live only for minutes,

  as we do in our implacable geologic time.

  INVISIBLE

  Within the wilder shores of sky

  billions of insects are migrating

  for reasons of sex and food,

  or so I’m told by science,

  in itself as invisible as the specters

  of love and death. What can I see

  from here but paper and the mind’s

  random images? A living termite

  was found on sticky paper at 19,000 feet.

  Perhaps she thought she had lost

  the world as I think I must, barring

  flora, fauna, family, dogs, the earth,

  the mind ground of being as it is.

  A few years back I began to lose

  the world of people. I couldn’t hold on.

  Rüppell’s vulture was seen at 36,000 feet

  for reasons the gods keep from us.

  MARY

  How can this dog on the cushion

  at my feet have passed me

  in the continuum of age, a knot

  in our hearts that never unwinds? This dog

  is helplessly herself and cannot think otherwise.

  When called she often conceals herself

  behind a bush, a tree, or tall grass

  pondering if she should obey. Now crippled

  at twelve, bearing up under pain

  on the morning run, perhaps wondering

  remotely what this is all about, the slowness

  that has invaded her bones. Splayed out

  now in a prone running pose

  she moves in sleep slowly into the future

  that does not welcome us but is merely

  our destiny in which we disappear

  making room for others on the long march.

  The question still is how did she pass me

  happily ahead in this slow goodbye?

  REMOTE FRIENDS

  Yes, in the predawn black

  the slim slip of the waning moon,

  the cuticle of an unknown god,

  perhaps Mother Night, the outline

  of her back between points of stars,

  she’s heading south toward Mexico

  preferring mountains, rivers, oceans, jungles

  that return her affection for earth.

  It’s been hard work to guide migrating

  birds for 150 million years. To her

  we’re newcomers, but then she married

  me, a stranger whom she’s worn thin as water.

  POET SCIENCE

  In my recent studies I have discovered cancer.

  Last year it was the language of birds

  and the year before, time by drowning a clock in the toilet.

  It is life’s work to recognize the mystery

  of the obvious. Cancer is a way the gods

  have learned to kill us. In numbers it’s tied

  with war and famine. Time is the way

  our deaths are numbered precisely. The birds

  and their omnipresent language, their music,

  have resisted conclusions as surely as the stars

  above them which they use for navigation.

  I have prayed willingly to their disinterest,

  the way they look past me into the present,

  their songs greeting both daylight and dark.

  They’ve been on earth fifty times longer than us

  right down to the minute, and they’ve told me

  that cancer and time are only death’s music,

  that we learned this music before birth without hearing it.

  Like cancer cells we’ve lost our way and will do anything to live.

  My mind can’t stop its only child so frightened of the dark.

  ACHE

  All this impermanence and suffering

  we share with dogs, bees, crows,

  the aquatic insect that lives but a single

  minute on a summer evening

  then descends to its river burial,

  perhaps into the mouth of a trout

  already full of its brothers and sisters

  while in a nearby meadow the she

  wolf approaches an infant elk

  she’ll share with her litter.

  Many of us live full term never seeing

  the bullet, the empty plate of hunger,

  the invisible noose of disease.

  We can’t imagine the rings of the bristlecone

  that lived for millennia. We cut it down

  to number the years like our own insolent birthdays.

  ORIOLE

  Emerging after three months to the edge

  of the hole of pain I arrange

  ten orange halves on a stiff wire

  off the patio between a small tree

  and the feeder. Early next morning

  five orioles of three species appear:

  Scott’s, hooded, Bullock’s. Thinking

  of those long nights: this is what agony wanted,

  these wildly colored birds to inhabit

  my mind far from pain.

  Now they live inside me.

  BLUE SHAWL

  The other day at the green dumpsters,

  an old woman in a blue shawl

  told me that she loved my work.

  RIVER I

  I was there in a room in a village

  by the river when the moon fell into the window

  frame and was trapped there too long.

  I was fearful but I was upside down

  and my prayers fell off the ceiling.

  Our small dog Jacques jumped on the sofa

  near the window, perched on the sofa’s back

  and released the moon to head south.

  Just after dawn standing in the green yard

  I watched a girl ride down the far side

  of the railroad tracks on a beauteous white horse

  whose lower legs were wrapped in red tape.

  Above her head were mountains covered with snow.

  I decided we were born to be moving water not ice.

  RIVER II

  Another dawn in the village by the river

  and I’m jealous of the 63 moons of Jupiter.

  Out in the yard inspecting a lush lilac bush

  followed by five dogs who have chosen

  me as their temporary leader. I look up

  through the vodka jangle of the night before,

  straight up at least 30,000 feet where the mountains

  are tipping over on me. Dizzy I grab the lilacs

  for support. Of course it’s the deceitful clouds

  playing the game of becoming mountains.

  Once on our nighttime farm on a moonlit walk

  the clouds pushed by a big western wind

  became a school of whales swimming hard

  across the cold heavens and I finally knew

  that we walk the bottom of an ocean we call sky.

  RIVER III

  Saw a poem float by just beneath

  the surface, another corpse of the spirit

  we weren’t available to retrieve.

  It isn’t comforting to admit that our days

  are fatal, that the corpse of the spirit

  gradually becomes the water and waits

  for another, or perhaps you, to return

  to where you belong, not in the acting

  of a shaker sprinkling its salt

  everywhere. You have to hold your old

  heart lightly as the female river holds

&nbs
p; the clouds and trees, its fish

  and the moon, so lightly but firmly

  enough so that nothing gets away.

  RIVER IV

  The river seems confused today because it

  swallowed the thunderstorm above us. At my age

  death stalks me but I don’t mind. This is to be

  expected but how can I deal with the unpardonable

  crime of loneliness? The girl I taught to swim

  so long ago has gone to heaven, the kind of thing

  that happens while we’re on the river fishing and

  seeing the gorgeously colored western tanagers and the

  profusion of nighthawks that some call bullbats,

  nightjars, and down on the border they call them

  goatsuckers for stealing precious milk. I love

  this misfiring of neurons in which I properly

  understand nothing, not the wild high current

  or the thunderstorm on which it chokes. Did the

  girl swim to heaven through the ocean of sky?

  Maybe. I can deny nothing. Two friends are mortally

  ill. Were it not for the new moon my sky

  would collapse tonight so fed by the waters of memory.

  RIVER V

  Resting in an eddy against dense greenery

  so thick you can’t see into it but can fathom

  its depth by waning birdcalls, hum of insects.

  This morning I learned that we live and die

  as children to the core only carrying

  as a protective shell a fleshy costume