Songs of Unreason

by Jim Harrison

The violent wind.

  The violent wind.

  On watch on the ship’s stern.

  The past disappears

  with the ship’s wake

  and the furling dark waters.

  A local girl walked over the top

  of the Absaroka Mountain Range

  and was never seen again. Some say

  a grizzly bear got her, some say aliens,

  I think that fueled by loneliness

  she is still walking.

  One day a heron walked

  up our front steps and looked

  into the front-door window.

  Was it a heron and also

  something else?

  Years ago at the cabin when returning

  from the saloon at night

  I’d scratch the ears of a bear

  who’d rest his chin on the car windowsill.

  Azure. All told a year of water.

  Some places with no bottom.

  I had hoped to understand it

  but it wasn’t possible. Fish.

  She told me in white tennis shorts

  that when you think you can’t

  take it anymore you’re just getting started.

  No pieces can be put back together.

  Last week in this pasture it was 75.

  Today it’s 29 and snowing. The world is too small

  with a limited amount of weather

  with no cosmic 15,000-mph winds.

  A piece of luck!

  These birds. Cutting up often dreary

  life and letting joy seep through.

  What are they? It’s not for me to know

  but to sense, to feel flight and song,

  even in today’s gray snowy sky.

  Why does the mind compose this music

  well before the words occur? The gods

  created the sun and we the lightbulb

  and the medicine that kept the happy child alive.

  Some of my friends sought their deathbeds,

  Celtic dogs with their death tails

  in their teeth. I thought I knew

  them but I didn’t. They ignored birds.

  Late October and now I wear a wool

  cap around the clock, take three naps a day.

  I’ve no clear memory why this happens,

  something about the earth tilting on an axis.

  Yesterday twenty-three sandhill cranes flew north. Why?

  I pray for seven women I know

  who have cancer. I can’t tell you why

  they have cancer and neither can doctors.

  They are beaten by a stranger with no face.

  Recently ghosts are more solid than we are,

  they have color and meat on their bones,

  even odor and voices. You can only tell them

  by what’s missing. A nose, ear, feet on backward,

  their hair that floats though the air is still.

  We fear the small hole in our brain

  that made its tubular descent to the center of the earth

  when we were born. In the loveliest landscape,

  the tinge of death. The photo of the mammoth grizzly

  gaining on the young buffalo? No, the tinge is in the air.

  Fifty years ago in our cold, snowbound

  house in the north, Carlos Montoya brought sunlight.

  When I finally went to Seville and Granada,

  the cold house sometimes entered my hotel rooms,

  a flash of snowdrifts among the orange trees.

  Off Ecuador the whale was so close I could smell

  her oily smell, look into a soccer-ball eye.

  I was frightened when the motor quit

  and I couldn’t see land. Now I can’t see

  the ocean in the mountains, only watch the rivers run.

  After a long siege of work

  I wake up to a different world.

  I’m older of course, but colors and shapes

  have changed. The mountains have moved a bit,

  our children are older. How could this happen?

  When young I read that during the Philippine War

  we shot six hundred Indians in a wide pit. It didn’t seem fair.

  During my entire life I’ve been helpless

  in this matter. I even dream about it.

  I read so much that my single eye became hot

  as if it had been staring into nebulae.

  Of course it had. On some clear nights in the country

  the stars can exhaust us. They only mean what they are.

  In summer I walk the dogs at dawn

  before the rattlesnakes awake. In cold weather

  I walk the dogs at dawn out of habit.

  In the pastures we find many oval deer beds

  of crushed grass. Their bodies are their homes.

  The tree only intends what it is with its dictator

  genome. Like us they don’t see what’s coming.

  They often rot from inside out though it can take

  decades. When sawed down you smell the sharp

  edged ripeness of their lives, their blood.

  The clouds are only a foot above my head

  and there’s a brisk cold wind from the north.

  Still, when I pass the yard headed for the hills

  the garden is lavish with dying and dead

  flowers, so many wild immutable colors

  that my cold head soars up through the clouds.

  Out in the pasture I found the second concealed

  hole descending to a room sculpted from hard dirt.

  The previous owner was frightened of atomic attack.

  Now it’s the home of the beast god forgot to invent.

  This is where our bodies will sit down to eat us.

  On television I saw a tall willowy girl jump

  seven feet in the air. How grand to have a dozen

  of these girls weaving in and out of the pines

  and willows in the yard and jumping so high,

  perhaps to Stravinsky, the landscape visible

  under their bodies. They don’t have to be nice.

  Art often isn’t though it scrubs the soul fresh.

  The beauty of the rattlesnake is in its threat.

  As the Bulgarians say, the moon is to blame.

  Come to think of it that’s right. The moon

  works in waves of power like the ocean

  and I was swept away into wrongdoing

  when the moon was large. I am innocent.

  Of late I can wake up and the world

  isn’t quite recognizable or I’m finally

  with age losing my touch, my control.

  Three days seemed identical but then they were

  and perhaps in losing my self all became lucid.

  This isn’t a brave new world but one finally revealed.

  The brush I scrub my soul with each morning

  is made of the ear-hairs of a number of animals:

  dogs, pigs, deer, goat, raccoon, a wolverine,

  and pinfeathers of particular birds, a secret.

  Brush too hard, your ambitions will be punished.

  I took the girl to the dance but she returned

  with another. I forgave her. I took her to another

  dance and she went home with two men. I forgave

  her again. This became a pattern, I forgave

  her so the maggots of hatred wouldn’t eat my brain.

  The night is long for a hungry dog.

  We’re not with them in spirit. They’re alone.

  The small teddy bear Lulu gave me in France

  suddenly tipped over on my desk. Does this mean

  my beloved is dead? She’s ninety-three. Her

  food and wine were the essence of earth.

  In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan

  and mountains of the Mexican border

  I’ve followed the calls of birds

  that don’t exist into thickets

  and u
p canyons. I’m unsure

  if all of me returned.

  I left this mangy little

  three-legged bear two big fish

  on a stump. He ate them at night

  and at dawn slept like a god

  leaning against the stump

  in a chorus of birds.

  The day was so dulcet and beautiful

  I could think about nothing.

  I lost my head.

  A big warm wind in November,

  yellow willow leaves

  swirl around one hundred

  white sheep.

  This world is going to sleep.

  Woke up from a nap and in an instant

  knew I was alive. It was startling

  to the point of fear. Emotions and sensations

  were drowning me. This had never happened before.

  On a blue chair in a pasture I relearned the world.

  I’ve heard it three times from the woods,

  le cri de Merlin. Fear is the price

  you pay for remoteness, pure fear, somber

  and penetrating. Maybe it’s just that female wolf

  I saw. The world is not what we thought it was.

  In the Yucatán the jungle was from the movies

  until the second day, then became itself.

  I go away then come home but the jungle’s

  birds and snakes are with me in the snow.

  You carry with you all the places you’ve ever been.

  In a foreign city, even New York, I’m never

  convinced I’ll get back home where I wish to be.

  It seems unlikely. The routes disappear.

  You can follow the birds home but they’re too fast

  and often change their minds. Especially crows.

  Reading Gilfillan’s Warbler Road I learn

  what I don’t care about anymore by its absence.

  These tiny birds are the living jewelry of the gods.

  They clothe my life in proper mystery telling me

  that all is not lost, harboring as they do stillborn children.

  I’m quite tired of beating myself up

  to write. I think I’ll start letting

  the words slip out like a tired child.

  “Can I have a piece of pie” he asks,

  and then he’s asleep back on the cusp of the moon.

  Again I wonder if I’ll return.

  France twice this fall, then New York. Will I know

  if I don’t return? The basic question of life.

  Does Robert Frost know he’s dead? His Yankee wit

  a dust mote. God’s stories last until no one hears.

  The fly on the window is not a distant crow

  in the sky. We’re forced into these decisions.

  People are forever marrying the wrong people

  and the children of the world suffer.

  Their dreams hang in the skies out of reach.

  There’s no question about circles, curves,

  and loops, life’s true structures, but the edges,

  straight lines, squares come from us.

  We must flee these shapes, even linear sentences

  that limit us to doors, up and down ladders,

  straight trajectories which will curve in eternity.

  In Africa back in 1972 one day I studied

  a female lion with blood on her fluttering whiskers,

  traces of dark blood on her muzzle. A creature died

  as we all must. In my seventies I see the invisible

  lion not stalking but simply waiting, the solution

  of the mystery I don’t want to solve. She’s waiting.

  One day near here there was an earthquake

  that started a new river in the mountains. During

  the ponderous snowmelt in spring the river

  is hundreds of feet deep and massive boulders roll

  crashing along the bottom though you can’t see them.

  I’ve traveled back to the invention of trees

  but never water. Water is too far in the blind past

  whereas trees have eyes that help us see

  their penetration of earth. Much that you see

  isn’t with your eyes. Throughout the body are eyes.

  Of course we are condemned to life without parole

  until the gods usher us in to our executioners

  who live in a hot windowless room, always dark.

  But then our fragility imagines everything

  and the final moment is a kiss from the lipless gods.

  Years before Hubble I thrust myself

  far up into the night and saw that the constellations

  were wildly colored. This frightened me

  so I swam a river at night waiting for the stars

  to resume their whiteness to adapt to my limits.

  Years before Hubble I thrust myself

  far up into the night and saw that the constellations

  were wildly colored. This frightened me

  so I swam a river at night waiting for the stars

  to resume their whiteness to adapt to my limits.

  In Fillmore, Utah, night of the full moon,

  Nov. 20, a day of blizzard, driving rain,

  at 4:44 a.m. I’m arranging my tiny petrified

  truffles from the Dordogne on the motel table.

  They look like the decayed teeth of a small predator.

  I’ll leave one behind to start a new civilization.

  The birds of winter. How I brooded

  about them in my childhood. Why not fly south?

  In the kingdom of birds everyone lives until they don’t.

  It’s sudden. The chickadee hanging on a barb

  of wire half eaten by the northern shrike. Birds kill

  each other like we do but to eat. We’re both five billion.

  Whoever destroys their home rapes the gods.

  The body wins another little argument

  with doom. You wake to a crisp, clear morning

  and you’re definitely not dead. The golden light

  flows down the mountain across the creek. A little vodka

  and twelve hours of sleep. Nature detonates your mind

  with the incalculable freshness of the new day.

  The creek bed in front of our casita

  has many tracks: javelina, deer, mountain

  lion, and sometimes in the sand the serpentine

  trace of a fat rattler. Foremost I love

  the tracks left by hundreds of species of birds

  that remain in the air like we do.

  What vices we can hold in our Big Heads

  and Big Minds, our Humor and Humility.

  We don’t march toward death, it marches toward us

  as a summer thunderstorm came slowly across

  the lake long ago. See the lightning of mortality dance,

  the black clouds whirling as if a million crows.

  Doom should be ashamed of itself.

  It’s so ordinary happening to billions

  of creatures. It’s common as a toilet seat,

  the discarded shoes of a lifetime. It’s proper

  that it often hides itself until the last moment

  and then the eternal silent music begins.

  I’m unaware of what kind of singer I’ve become.

  Each night there’s a glass of vodka that quickly

  becomes the color of my blood, the color of the guts

  of archangels, the color pumped in dirt by the hearts

  of soldiers. Any more than one glass of vodka

  smears the constellations, the true source of light.

  In my final moment I’ll sing a nonsense ditty

  of reconciliation knowing that music came

  before words. I’m only a painter in Lascaux.

  I’ve sold my destiny for a simple quarter that bought

  me the world that I’ve visited at twilight.

  I will sing even with my tongue sliced<
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  into a fork. At the hospital this morning

  I learned I’ll be a nursemaid forever

  or exactly as long as forever lasts. I study birds

  that give me the tentative spaciousness of flight.

  About the Author

  Jim Harrison, one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers, is the author of thirty-four books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—including Legends of the Fall, the acclaimed trilogy of novellas, and The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems. His books have been translated into two dozen languages, and in 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With a fondness for open space and anonymous thickets, he divides his time between Montana and southern Arizona.

  Books by Jim Harrison

  POETRY COLLECTIONS

  Plain Song

  Locations

  Outlyer and Ghazals

  Letters to Yesenin

  Returning to Earth

  Selected and New Poems: 1961-1981

  The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems

  After Ikkyū

  The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems