Songs of Unreason

by Jim Harrison

  Right now a wind has come up and there’s a strange

  blizzard of willow buds outside my studio.

  I’m on death row but won’t give up corruption.

  I’ve waterboarded myself. I’m guilty of everything.

  OUR ANNIVERSARY

  I want to go back to that wretched old farm

  on a cold November morning eating herring

  on the oil tablecloth at daylight, the hard butter

  in slivers and chunks on rye bread, gold-colored

  homemade butter. Fill the woodbox, Jimmy.

  Clots of cream in the coffee, hiss and crackle

  of woodstove. Outside it’s been the hardest freeze

  yet but the heels still break through into the earth.

  A winter farm is dead and you want to head for the woods.

  In the barn the smell of manure and still-green hay

  hit the nose with the milk in the metal pails.

  Grandpa is on the last of seven cows,

  tugging their dicklike udders, a squirt in the mouth

  for the barn cat. My girlfriend loves another

  and at twelve it’s as if all the trees have died.

  Sixty years later seven hummingbirds at the feeder,

  miniature cows in their stanchions sipping liquid sugar.

  We are fifty years together. There are still trees.

  DOORS

  I’m trying to create an option for all

  these doors in life. You’re inside

  or out, outside or in. Of late, doors

  have failed us more than the two-party system

  or marriages comprising only one person.

  We’ve been fooled into thousands of dualisms

  which the Buddha says is a bad idea.

  Nature has portals rather than doors.

  There are two vast cottonwoods near a creek

  and when I walk between them I shiver.

  Winding through my field of seventy-seven

  large white pine stumps from about 1903

  I take various paths depending on spirit.

  The sky is a door never closed to us.

  The sun and moon aren’t doorknobs.

  Dersu Uzala slept outside for forty-five years.

  When he finally moved inside he died.

  GREED

  I’m greedy for the pack rat to make

  it across the swift creek. It’s my first swimming

  pack rat and I wonder why he wants the other side.

  The scent of a pack-rat woman perhaps.

  I’m greedy for those I prayed for to survive

  cancer, greedy for money we don’t need,

  for the freshest fish to eat every day

  without moving to the ocean’s shore,

  to have many lovers who don’t ruin my marriage

  and that my dog will live longer than me

  to avoid the usual sharp boyhood heartbreak,

  to regain the inch and a half I lost with age, to see

  my youngest aunt pull up her nylons again in 1948.

  Oh how I wanted a real sponge, a once-living

  creature, and a wide chamois cloth to wash

  cars for a quarter, a huge twenty-cent burger

  and a five-cent Coca-Cola for lunch, greedy

  that my beloved wife will last longer than me,

  that the wind will blow harder up the girl’s

  summer dress, for three dozen oysters

  and a bottle of 1985 Pétrus at twilight,

  to smoke a cigarette again in a bar, that my

  daughters live to be a hundred if they so wish,

  that I march to heaven barefoot on a spring morning.

  CEREAL

  Late-night herring binge causes sour

  gut. My dog ate the Hungarian partridge

  eggs in the tall grass, her jaws dripping

  yolk, therefore I ate a cereal for breakfast

  guaranteed to restore my problematic health.

  Soon enough I’ll be diving for my own

  herring in the North Atlantic, or running so fast

  I nearly take off like the partridge mother

  abandoning her eggs to the canine monster.

  It will be strange to be physically magnificent

  at my age, the crowds of girls cooing

  around me as I bounce up and down

  as if my legs cannot contain their pogo strength,

  but I leave the girls behind, bouncing across

  a river toward the end of the only map we have,

  the not very wide map of the known world.

  D.B.

  A winter dawn in New York City

  with people rushing to work

  eating rolls, drinking paper cups

  of coffee. This isn’t the march of the dead

  but people moving toward their livelihoods

  in this grim, cold first sign of daylight.

  I watched the same thing in Paris

  and felt like the eternal meddler sitting

  at the window, trying to avoid

  conclusions about humans, their need

  to earn their daily bread, as we used to say.

  In Paris I know a lovely woman

  who wears a twenty-foot-long wool skirt

  to hide her legs from men. Who can blame

  her though I fear the grave dangers

  of this trailing garment clipped and woven

  from lowly sheep. What a burden

  it is to drag this heavy skirt

  throughout the workday to hide from desire

  as if her sexuality had become a car bomb

  rather than a secret housepet hidden

  from the landlords of the world who are always there.

  SUNLIGHT

  After days of darkness I didn’t understand

  a second of yellow sunlight

  here and gone through a hole in clouds

  as quickly as a flashbulb, an immense

  memory of a moment of grace withdrawn.

  It is said that we are here but seconds in cosmic

  time, twelve and a half billion years,

  but who is saying this and why?

  In the Salt Lake City airport eight out of ten

  were fiddling relentlessly with cell phones.

  The world is too grand to reshape with babble.

  Outside the hot sun beat down on clumsy metal

  birds and an actual ten-million-year-old

  crow flew by squawking in bemusement.

  We’re doubtless as old as our mothers, thousands

  of generations waiting for the sunlight.

  BRUTISH

  The man eating lamb’s tongue salad

  rarely thinks of the lamb.

  The oral surgeon jerking twenty teeth out

  in a day still makes marinara sauce.

  The German sorting baby shoes at Treblinka

  writes his wife and children frequently.

  The woman loves her husband, drops two kids

  at day care, makes passionate love

  to an old boyfriend at the Best Western.

  We are parts. What part are you now?

  The shit of the world has to be taken

  care of every day. You have to choose

  your part after you take care of the shit.

  I’ve chosen birds and fish, the creatures

  whose logic I wish to learn and live.

  NIGHTFEARS

  What is it that you’re afraid of at night?

  Is it the gunman at the window, the rattler

  slipping into your boot on the patio, the painful

  quirk in your tummy or the semitruck

  drifting across the centerline because the driver

  is text-messaging a she-male girlfriend in El Paso?

  Is it because so many birds these days are born

  with one wing like poets in campus infirmaries,

  that the ghouls of finance, or the post office,

  h
ave taken your paycheck to pay for Kool-Aid

  parties around their empty pools? The night

  has decided to stick around for a week

  and people are confused, we creatures of habit

  who took the sun for granted. She had decided

  on whim to keep herself from us, calling down

  the descent of a galactic cloud, to let flowers

  wilt and die. Whole countries expire in hysteria

  and troops must march in the glare of headlights.

  When the red sun decides to rise again we humans

  of earth swim through the acrid milk of our brains

  toward the rising light, a new song on our lips,

  but all creatures retreat from us, their murderers.

  In real dawn’s early light my poached egg is only an egg.

  BLUE

  During last night’s blue moon

  the Great Matter and Original Mind

  were as close as your skin.

  In the predawn dark you ate muskmelon

  and the color of the taste lit up the mind.

  The first finch awoke and the moon

  descended into its mountain burial.

  THE CURRENT POOR

  The rich are giving the poor bright-colored

  balloons, a dollar a gross, also bandages,

  and leftover Mercurochrome from the fifties.

  It is an autumn equinox and full moon present,

  an event when night and day are precisely

  equal, but then the poor know that night

  always wins, grows wider and longer

  until Christmas when they win a few minutes.

  Under the tree there’s an orange big as a basketball.

  It is the exiled sun resting in its winter coolness.

  MOPING

  Please help me, gentle reader. I need advice.

  I need to carbonate my brain

  before nightfall. One more night

  with this heaviness will suffocate me.

  It’s probably only the terror

  of particulars. Memories follow us

  like earaches in childhood. I’m surrounded

  by sad-eyed burros, those motel paintings

  I thought were book reviewers and politicians

  but no, they’re all my dead friends

  who keep increasing in numbers until

  it occurs to me that I might join them one day

  floating out there in the anemic ether

  of nothingness, but that’s not my current business.

  Just for the time being my brain needs oxygen

  though I’m not sure what it is, life’s puzzle

  where you wake in a foreign land and the people

  haven’t shown themselves but the new birds

  are haunting. The mind visits these alien Egypts,

  these incalculable sunrises in a new place,

  these birds of appetite with nowhere to land.

  CHURCH

  After last night’s storm the tulip

  petals are strewn across the patio

  where they mortally fluttered. Only the gods

  could reconnect them to their green stems

  but they choose not to perform such banal

  magic. Life bores deep holes in us

  in hopes the nature of what we are

  might sink into us without the blasphemy

  of the prayer for parlor tricks. Ask the gods

  to know them before you beg for favors.

  The pack rat removes the petals one by one.

  Now they are in a secret place, not swept away.

  The death of flowers is unintentional. Who knows

  if either of us will have a memory of ourselves?

  If you stay up in the mountains it’s always cold

  but if you come down to the world of men you suffocate

  in the folds of the overripe ass of piety, the smell

  of alms not flowers, the smiling beast of greed.

  CHATTER

  Back on the blue chair before the green studio

  I’m keeping track of the outside world

  rather than the inside where my brain seethes

  in its usual mischief. Like many poets

  I’m part blackbird and part red squirrel

  and my brain chatters, shrieks, and whistles

  but outside it tends to get real quiet

  as if the greenery, garden, and mountains

  can be put into half sleep though a female

  blackbird is irritated with me. She’s protecting

  her fledgling child that died last Friday.

  I placed a small white peony on its body.

  Meanwhile the outside is full of the stuff of life.

  Inside it’s sitting there slumped with the burden

  of memory and anecdotal knowledge, the birds of appetite

  flitting here and there singing about sex and food,

  the girl bending over with her impossible target,

  or will it be foie gras or bologna and mayo?

  The fish back then were larger and swam past

  along with a few horses and dogs. Japanese

  archers once used dogs for target practice

  and that’s why we won the war. A dead friend

  still chatters his squirrel chatter like the squirrel

  in the TV hunting program shot in the gut,

  scurrying in a circle carrying the arrow

  on a narrowing route. Funerals, parties,

  and voyages greet the mind without gentleness.

  Outside the mother blackbird shrieks. I can’t help.

  RETURN

  Leaving on an exciting journey

  is one thing, though most of all

  I am engaged in homecoming —

  the dogs, the glass of wine, a favorite

  pillow that missed your head, the local

  night with its familiar darkness.

  The birds that ignored your absence

  are singing at dawn assuring you

  that all is inconceivable.

  PRADO

  After the ghostly Prado and in the Botanic

  Gardens I tried to get in touch with Goya’s

  dogs. I called and called near the tiny blue roses

  but likely my language was wrong

  for these ancient creatures. Maybe they

  know we destroyed the good hunting

  in Spain and won’t leave their paintings.

  I can’t give up. My waning vision

  is fairly good at seeing dog souls. I wait

  listening to unknown birds, noting the best voice

  comes from one small and brown.

  I feel a muzzle on my hand and knee

  while thinking of the Caravaggio with David

  looking down at the slain Goliath. This never

  happens, this slaying of the brutal monster.

  We know the ones that have cursed our lives.

  Franco can’t hear me talking to the ghost dog.

  I was lucky that early on the birds and fish

  disarmed me and the monster in my soul fled.

  But where am I? Where can an animal hide?

  DEATH AGAIN

  Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.

  Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.

  We must think of it as cooking breakfast,

  it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl

  or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin

  after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,

  slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard

  to accept your last kiss, your last drink,

  your last meal about which the condemned

  can be quite particular as if there could be

  a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers

  sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid

  lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon

  call, an
d staring into the still, opaque water.

  We’ll know as children again all that we are

  destined to know, that the water is cold

  and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

  SUITE OF UNREASON

  Nearly all my life I’ve noted that some of my thinking was atavistic, primitive, totemistic. This can be disturbing to one fairly learned. In this suite I wanted to examine this phenomenon.

  The moon is under suspicion.

  Of what use is it?

  It exudes its white smoke of light.

  Her name was imponderable.

  Sitting in the grass seven feet

  from the lilacs she knew

  she’d never have a lover.

  She tends to her knitting

  which is the night.

  That morning the sun forgot to rise

  and for a while no one noticed

  except a few farmers, who shot themselves.

  The girl near the Théâtre de l’Odéon

  walked so swiftly

  we were astonished.

  The fish with the huge tumor

  jumped higher than my head

  from my hand when released.

  The girl in the green dress

  sang a wordless carol

  on the yellow school bus.

  The truest night of the hunter

  is when like his prey

  he never wakes up.

  Only one cloud

  is moving the wrong way

  across the sky

  on Sunday morning.

  The girl kissed a girl,

  the boy kissed a boy.

  What would become of them?

  The violent wind.