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    Jim Harrison: Complete Poems
    Jim Harrison: Complete Poems
    Jim Harrison: Complete Poems
    Ebook1,059 pages15 hours

    Jim Harrison: Complete Poems

    By Jim Harrison and Terry Tempest Williams

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    About this ebook

    Starred Review from Booklist: "This robust volume is a testament to the fortitude of a great American poet's work... [a] landmark collection."

    From the Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams: "Jim Harrison...was among the great ones—an elevated soul in all his unruliness who favored his senses and courted the wild on the page and in the world. His was a storied life that loomed large, and we are the beneficiaries. 'Such a powerful wounded poet—wrote as if he had to sing with a cut throat . . . and he did have to sing,' said Jorie Graham."

    Jim Harrison: Complete Poems is the definitive collection from one of America’s iconic writers. Introduced by activist and naturalist writer Terry Tempest Williams, this tour de force contains every poem Harrison published over his fifty-year career, as well as a section of previously unpublished "Last Poems." Here are the nature-based lyrics of his early work, the high-velocity ghazals, a harrowing prose-poem “correspondence” with a Russian suicide, the riverine suites, fearless meditations inspired by the Zen monk Crazy Cloud, and a joyous conversation in haiku-like gems with friend and fellow poet Ted Kooser. Weaving throughout these 1000 pages are Harrison’s legendary passions and appetites, his love songs and lamentations, and a clarion call to pay attention to the life you are actually living. Jim Harrison: Complete Poems confirms that Jim Harrison is a talented storyteller with a penetrating eye for details, or as Publishers Weeklycalled him, “an untrammeled renegade genius… a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language.”

    NOTE:Jim Harrison: Complete Poems also appears as a three-volume box set. Print run limited to 750 copies. Each volume is introduced by a different writer: Colum McCann, Joy Williams, and John Freeman. The box set retails for $85 and ISBN is 9781556596414.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 20, 2021
    ISBN9781619322479
    Jim Harrison: Complete Poems
    Author

    Jim Harrison

    Jim Harrison is a poet, novelist and essayist. His trilogy, The Legend of the Falls, has been adapted for film.

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      Book preview

      Jim Harrison - Jim Harrison

      PLAIN SONG

      1965

      to Linda

      POEM

      Form is the woods: the beast,

      a bobcat padding through red sumac,

      the pheasant in brake or goldenrod

      that he stalks—both rise to the flush,

      the brief low flutter and catch in air;

      and trees, rich green, the moving of boughs

      and the separate leaf, yield

      to conclusions they do not care about

      or watch—the dead, frayed bird,

      the beautiful plumage,

      the spoor of feathers

      and slight, pink bones.

      SKETCH FOR A JOB-APPLICATION BLANK

      My left eye is blind and jogs like

      a milky sparrow in its socket;

      my nose is large and never flares

      in anger, the front teeth, bucked,

      but not in lechery—I sucked

      my thumb until the age of twelve.

      O my youth was happy and I was never lonely

      though my friends called me pig eye

      and the teachers thought me loony.

      (When I bruised, my psyche kept intact:

      I fell from horses, and once a cow but never

      pigs—a neighbor lost a hand to a sow.)

      But I had some fears:

      the salesman of eyes,

      his case was full of fishy baubles,

      against black velvet, jeweled gore,

      the great cocked hoof of a Belgian mare,

      a nest of milk snakes by the water trough,

      electric fences,

      my uncle’s hounds,

      the pump arm of an oil well,

      the chop and whir of a combine in the sun.

      From my ancestors, the Swedes,

      I suppose I inherit the love of rainy woods,

      kegs of herring and neat whiskey—

      I remember long nights of pinochle,

      the bulge of Redman in my grandpa’s cheek;

      the rug smelled of manure and kerosene.

      They laughed loudly and didn’t speak for days.

      (But on the other side, from the German Mennonites,

      their rag-smoke prayers and porky daughters

      I got intolerance, and aimless diligence.)

      In ’51 during a revival I was saved:

      I prayed on a cold register for hours

      and woke up lame. I was baptized

      by immersion in the tank at Williamston—

      the rusty water stung my eyes.

      I left off the old things of the flesh

      but not for long—one night beside a pond

      she dried my feet with her yellow hair.

      O actual event dead quotient

      cross become green

      I still love Jubal but pity Hagar.

      (Now self is the first sacrament

      who loves not the misery and taint

      of the present tense is lost.

      I strain for a lunar arrogance.

      Light macerates

      the lamp infects

      warmth, more warmth, I cry.)

      DAVID

      He is young. The father is dead.

      Outside, a cold November night,

      the mourners’ cars are parked upon the lawn;

      beneath the porch light three

      brothers talk to three sons

      and shiver without knowing it.

      His mind’s all black thickets

      and blood; he knows

      flesh slips quietly off the bone,

      he knows no last looks,

      that among the profusion of flowers

      the lid is closed to hide

      what no one could bear—

      that metal rends the flesh,

      he knows beneath the white-pointed

      creatures, stars,

      that in the distant talk of brothers,

      the father is dead.

      EXERCISE

      Hear this touch: grass parts

      for the snake,

      in furrows

      soil curves around itself,

      a rock topples into a lake,

      roused organs,

      fur against cloth,

      arms unfold,

      at the edge of a clearing

      fire selects new wood.

      A SEQUENCE OF WOMEN

      I

      I’ve known her too long:

      we devour as two mirrors,

      opposed,

      swallow each other a thousand

      times at midpoints,

      lost in the black center

      of the other.

      II

      She sits on the bed,

      breasts slack,

      watching a curl of dust

      float through a ray of sun,

      drift down to a corner.

      So brief this meeting

      with a strange child—

      Do I want to be remembered?

      Only as a mare might know

      the body of her rider,

      the pressure of legs

      unlike any other.

      III

      The girl who was once my mistress

      is dead now, I learn, in childbirth.

      I thought that long ago women ceased

      dying this way.

      To set records straight, our enmity

      relaxes, I wrote a verse for her—

      to dole her by pieces, ring finger

      and lock of hair.

      But I’m a poor Midas to turn her golden,

      to make a Helen, grand whore, of this graceless

      girl; the sparrow that died was only

      a sparrow:

      Though in the dark, she doesn’t sleep.

      On cushions, embraced by silk, no lover

      comes to her. In the first light when birds

      stir she does not stir or sing. Oh eyes can’t

      focus to this dark.

      NORTHERN MICHIGAN

      On this back road the land

      has the juice taken out of it:

      stump fences surround nothing

      worth their tearing down

      by a deserted filling station

      a Veedol sign, the rusted hulk

      of a Frazer, live bait

      on battered tin.

      A barn

      with half a tobacco ad

      owns the greenness of a manure

      pile

      a half-moon on a privy door

      a rope swinging from an elm. A

      collapsed henhouse, a pump

      with the handle up

      the orchard with wild tangled branches.

      In the far corner of the pasture,

      in the shadow of the woodlot

      a herd of twenty deer:

      three bucks

      are showing off—

      they jump in turn across the fence,

      flanks arch and twist to get higher

      in the twilight

      as the last light filters

      through the woods.

      TREE

      Tree,

      arrows are made from you

      a guitar

      tables which hold food

      the walls of this house;

      your function is dictated

      in the shape of the wood

      from the sawyer who cradles

      you in iron tongs, the touch

      the teeth of steel—

      but this is speech

      and comes from the throat:

      your mouth or countless mouths

      are those leaves I look at now

      with silver bellies and dark backs

      that draw in sun, the air,

      that transpire and breathe for you—

      they are of no use to us

      except as shade, the greenness

      we expect, but to you they are life

      and compressed into blackness,

      after a century and inch of soil,

      they make you your food.

      RETURNING AT NIGHT

      Returning at night

      there’s a catalpa moth

      in the barberry

      on the table the flowers

      left alone turned black

      in the root cellar

      the potato sprouts

      creeping through the door

      glisten white and tubular

      in the third phase

      of the moon.

      APOLOGY

      I don’t weigh an hour

      in consecutive breaths—

      my sleeves are short,

      my elbows reveal thin wires

      attached to a skull

      that rattles when it wants

      to sing; but sometimes

      when a good rain falls

      and there is heat enough

      some fine clean grass

      even flowers

      grow up through the weeds

      in this boneyard.

      LOST

      When hunting I became lost,

      I walked for hours.

      All the ridges looked the same—

      the snow had a thick crust

      but not enough to hold my weight.

      I crossed my path twice.

      It began to get dark, my sweat

      turned cold, when between two huge

      charred pine stumps I thought I saw

      myself. I raised my rifle to shoot

      this ghost but then my father spoke.

      SHE

      She

      who is this other

      without masks, pitiless?

      A bald eye in a dump,

      a third-rail type who loves

      the touch of flesh,

      the bare thigh in a cafeteria

      crying mercy to the stone?

      Unlyric, she coils and strikes

      for the sake of striking.

      I’VE HAD ENOUGH TONIGHT.

      I’ve had enough tonight.

      My small room is cavernous,

      I hang like a bat from rafters

      while below me hymns are sung—

      three figures move in a circle of light,

      dark trinity at whose touch

      paper becomes stone

      words float like cells

      unite in reverse of nature.

      Let me sleep.

      My body shakes,

      a gourd in the hand of some giant child.

      ONCE I STOOD ALL NIGHT

      Once I stood all night

      beside a road with only the metallic

      rattling of a sign to keep me company.

      In the first light of dawn I read

      DANGER

      CURVE

      and in a ditch of weeds

      along a barbed-wire fence

      there were three black crosses.

      FAIR/BOY CHRISTIAN TAKES A BREAK

      This other speaks of bones, blood-wet

      and limber, the rock in bodies. He takes

      me to the slaughterhouse, where lying

      sprawled, as a giant coil of rope,

      the bowels of cattle. At the county fair

      we pay an extra quarter to see the her-

      maphrodite. We watch the secret air tube

      blow up the skirts of the farm girls,

      tanned to the knees then strangely white.

      We eat spareribs and pickled eggs,

      the horses tear the ground to pull a load

      of stone; in a burning tent we see

      Fantasia do her Love Dance with the

      Spaniard—they glisten with sweat, their

      limbs knot together while below them farm

      boys twitter like birds. Then the breasts

      of a huge Negress rotate to a march in

      opposing directions, and everyone stamps

      and cheers, the udders shine in blurring

      speed. Out of the tent we pass produce

      stalls, some hung with ribbons, squash

      and potatoes stacked in pyramids. A buck-

      toothed girl cuts her honorable-mention

      cake; when she leans to get me water

      from a milk pail her breasts are chaste.

      Through the evening I sit in the car (the

      other is gone) while my father watches

      the harness race, the 4-H talent show.

      I think of St. Paul’s Epistles and pray

      the removal of what my troubled eyes have seen.

      MORNING

      The mirror tastes him

      breath clouds

      hands pressed against glass

      in yellow morning light

      a jay

      flutters in unaccustomed

      silence

      from bush to limb of elm

      a cow at breakfast

      pauses

      her jaws lax in momentary stillness

      far off a milk truck

      rattles

      on the section road

      light low mist

      floats

      over the buckwheat

      through the orchard

      the neighbor’s dogs bark

      then four roosters announce

      day.

      GARDEN

      Standing at the window at night

      my shadow is the length of the garden—

      I move a huge arm and

      cause plants to spring up,

      tomatoes to ripen.

      My head is as large

      as a strawberry bed and I can

      cup two bales of straw in one hand.

      I take pride in this strength,

      fed by light and darkness,

      wielded against my father’s garden—

      a lord of shadows.

      HORSE

      A

      quarter horse, no rider

      canters through the pasture

      thistles raise soft purple burrs

      her flanks are shiny in the sun

      I whistle and she runs

      almost sideways toward me

      the oats in my hand are sweets to her:

      dun mane furling in its breeze,

      her neck

      corseted with muscle,

      wet teeth friendly against my hand—

      how can I believe

      you ran under a low maple limb

      to knock me off?

      KINSHIP

      Great-uncle Wilhelm, Mennonite, patriarch,

      eater of blood sausage, leeks,

      headcheese, salt pork,

      you are led into church

      by that wisp you plundered for nine children.

      Your brain has sugared now,

      your white beard is limp,

      you talk of acres of corn

      where there is only snow.

      Your sister, a witch, old as a stump,

      says you are punished now for the unspeakable

      sin that barred you from the table for seven years.

      They feed you cake to hasten your death.

      Your land is divided.

      Curse them but don’t die.

      FEBRUARY SUITE

      Song,

      angry bush

      with the thrust of your roots

      deep in this icy ground,

      is there a polar sun?

      Month of the frozen

      goat—

      La Roberta says cultivate

      new friends,

      profit will

      be yours with patience.

      Not that stars are crossed

      or light to be restored—

      we die from want of velocity.

      And you, longest of months

      with your false springs,

      you don’t help or care about helping,

      so splendidly ignorant of us.

      Today icicles fell

      but they will build downward again.

      Who has a fate?

      This fig tree

      talks

      about bad weather.

      Here is a man drunk—

      in the glass

      his blurred innocence renewed.

      The Great Leitzel

      before falling to her death

      did 249 flanges on the Roman rings—

      her wrist was often raw

      and bloody

      but she kept it hidden.

      He remembers Memorial Day—

      the mother’s hymn to Generals.

      The American Legion fires blanks

      out over the lassitude of the cemetery

      in memory of sons who broke

      like lightbulbs in a hoarse cry

      of dust.

      Now

      behind bone

      in the perfect dark

      the dream of animals.

      To remember

      the soft bellies of fish

      the furred animals that were part of your youth

      not for their novelty

      but as fellow creatures.

      I look at the rifles

      in their rack upon the wall:

      though I know the Wars

      only as history

      some cellar in Europe might still

      owe some of its moistness to blood.

      With my head on the table

      I write,

      my arm outstretched, in another field

      of richer grain.

      A red-haired doll stares

      at me from a highchair,

      her small pink limbs twisted about

      her neck.

      I salute the postures of women.

      This hammer of joy,

      this is no fist

      but a wonderment got by cunning.

      The first thunderstorm

      of March came last night

      and when I awoke the snow had passed

      away, the brown grass

      lay matted and pubic.

      Between the snow and grass,

      somewhere into the ground with the rain

      a long year has gone.

      TRAVERSE CITY ZOO

      Once I saw a wolf tread a circle in his cage

      amid the stench of monkeys, the noise of musty

      jungle birds. We threw him bits of doughy

      bread but he didn’t see us, padding on through

      some imagined forest, his nose on blood.

      We began to move on in boredom when he jumped

      against the bars, snarled, then howled

      in rage that long shrill howl that must remind

      us of another life. Children screamed and ran,

      their parents passing them in terror—the summer

      day became hard and brittle. I stooped there

      and watched his anger until the keeper

      came with a Flash Gordon gun and shot him full

      of dope. He grew smaller and sputtered into sleep.

      REVERIE

      He thinks of the dead. But they

      appear as dead—beef-colored and torn.

      There is a great dull music

      in the ocean that lapses into seascape.

      The girl bends slowly

      from the waist. Then stoops.

      In high school Brutus

      died upon a rubber knife.

      Lift the smock. The sun-

      light stripes her back. A fado wails.

      In an alley in Cambridge. Beneath

      a party’s noise. Bottle caps stuck to them.

      FOX FARM

      In the pasture a shire

      whose broad muscles once

      drew a hayrake,

      a plough,

      can’t hold the weight of his great

      head and neck—

      he will be fed to the foxes.

      And the Clydesdales and saddle nags

      that stray along the fence

      with limps and sagging bellies,

      with rheumy eyes (one

      has no tail).

      But the foxes

      not having known field

      or woods,

      bred, born in long rows of hutches,

      will die to adorn some

      woman’s neck.

      THE PAINTING ON THE WALL

      The painting on the wall,

      the smooth fat thigh of a girl

      drives me from my room—

      so lovely she is

      that I look for her sisters

      in the streets but find none.

      TICKET

      To those who stalk terminals

      in the glaze of tears of light.

      Sir Violet, food-stooped but nimble

      asks me for a light, for my dork

      with a whorelike glance.

      He takes me for a student—

      Why education’s the ticket to the future.

      I answer with a Bronx cheer

      and he shrugs and walks away.

      Old queen of a dry country,

      these soiled tiles,

      the air that groans of buses

      and wailing Negro children,

      uncourtly stew bums,

      orange rinds,

      your garden of love

      is a weedpatch.

      NIGHTMARE

      Through the blinds

      a white arm caresses a vase of zinnias

      beneath the skin

      of a pond the laughter of an eye

      in the loft

      the hot straw suffocates

      the rafters become snakes

      through the mow door

      three deer in a cool pasture

      nibbling at the grass

      mercurous in the moon.

      CREDO, AFTER E.P.

      Go, my songs

      to the young and insolent,

      speak the love of final things—

      do not betray me

      as a dancer, drunk,

      is dumb to his clumsiness.

      DUSK

      Dusk over the lake,

      clouds floating

      heat lightning

      a nightmare behind branches;

      from the swamp

      the odor of cedar and fern,

      the long circular

      wail of the loon—

      the plump bird aches for fish

      for night to come down.

      Then it becomes so dark

      and still

      that I shatter the moon with an oar.

      LISLE’S RIVER

      Dust followed our car like a dry brown cloud.

      At the river we swam, then in the canoe passed

      downstream toward Manton; the current carried us

      through cedar swamps, hot fields of marsh grass

      where deer watched us and the killdeer shrieked.

      We were at home in a thing that passes.

      And that night, camped on a bluff, we ate eggs

      and ham and three small trout; we drank too much

      whiskey and pushed a burning stump down the bank—

      it cast hurling shadows, leaves silvered and darkened,

      the crash and hiss woke up a thousand birds.

      Now, tell me, other than lying between some woman’s legs,

      what joy have you had since, that equaled this?

      THREE NIGHT SONGS

      I

      He waits to happen with the clear

      reality of what he thinks about—

      to be a child who wakes beautifully,

      a man always in the state of waking

      to a new room, or at night, waking

      to a strange room with snow outside,

      and the moon beyond glass,

      in a net of branches,

      so bright and clear and cold.

      II

      Moving in liquid dark,

      night’s water,

      a flat stone sinking,

      wobbling toward bottom;

      and not to wait there for morning,

      to see the sun up through the water,

      but to freeze until another glacier comes.

      III

      The mask riddles itself,

      there’s heat through the eye slits,

      a noise of breathing,

      the plaster around the mouth is wet;

      and the dark takes no effort,

      dark against deeper dark,

      the mask dissembles,

      a music comes to the point of horror.

      CARDINAL

      That great tree covered with snow

      until its branches droop,

      the oak, that keeps its leaves through winter

      (in spring a bud breaks the stem),

      has in its utmost branch

      a cardinal,

      who brushing snow aside, pauses for an instant

      then plummets toward earth

      until just above a drift he opens his wings

      and brakes, fluttering

      in a cloud of snow he pushed aside.

      BELLEVUE

      John in the desert

      mixed honey with blood.

      Three white birds surround me

      and my voice is in my feet—

      How beautiful with shoes, O Redeemer.

      From a lightbulb a drop of blood emerges

      and floats

      softly down toward my head,

      the room whines O Redeemer,

      this is my baptism.

      THIS IS COLD SALT

      This is cold salt

      a pulled tooth

      the freshly set bone:

      the girl who left my bed this morning,

      who smiled last night as her slip

      floated to the floor,

      my Roselita,

      today up on Amsterdam Avenue

      I saw her with her Manuelo.

      JOHN SEVERIN WALGREN, 1874–1962

      Trees die of thirst or cold

      or when the limit’s reached;

      in the hole in the elm

      the wood is soft and punky—

      it smells of the water of a vase

      after the flowers are dumped.

      You were so old we could not weep;

      only the blood of the young,

      those torn off earth in a night’s sickness,

      the daughter lying beside you

      who became nothing so long ago—

      she moves us to terror.

      NEW LITURGY

      Sanctus deus

      praise be the skull among flowers

      and ornamental war.

      Sanctus deus

      praise be my skull among flowers

      black sun

      red moon

      cold metal of death.

      Sanctus deus

      white skull

      bitter flowers

      praise be the fruit no child eats

      full of blood

      dry as death.

      MALEDICTION

      Man’s not a singing animal,

      his tongue hangs from a wall—

      pinch the stone

      to make a moan

      from the throat

      a single note

      breaks the air

      so bare and harsh

      birds die.

      He’s crab-necked from cold,

      song splits his voice

      like a lake’s ice cracking.

      His heart’s a rock,

      a metronome, a clock,

      a foghorn drone of murder.

      God, curse this self-maimed beast,

      the least of creatures,

      rivet his stone with worms.

      WORD DRUNK

      I think of the twenty thousand poems of Li Po

      and wonder, do words follow me or I them—

      a word drunk?

      I do not care about fine phrases,

      the whoring after honor,

      the stipend, the gift, the grant—

      but I would feed on an essence

      until it yields to me my own dumb form—

      the weight raw, void of intent;

      to see behind the clarity of my glass

      the birth of new creatures

      suffused with light.

      YOUNG BULL

      This bronze ring punctures

      the flesh of your nose,

      the wound is fresh

      and you nuzzle the itch

      against a fence post.

      Your testicles are fat and heavy

      and sway when you shake off flies;

      the chickens scratch about your feet

      but you do not notice them.

      Through lunch I pitied

      you from the kitchen window—

      the heat, pained fluid of August—

      but when I came with cold water

      and feed, you bellowed and heaved

      against the slats wanting to murder me.

      PARK AT NIGHT

      Unwearied

      the coo and choke

      of doves

      the march of stone

      an hour before dawn.

      Trees caged to the waist

      wet statues

      the trickling of water—

      in the fountain

      floating across the lamp

      a leaf

      some cellophane.

      NOT CASIDA, CANZONE—

      Not casida, canzone—

      sentience in another’s mouth,

      and O song transfusor

      not bird, beast, air or sun—

      another’s mouth.

      Her weight anchors the bed

      in a square of light across the street—

      there’s no dancing in this yellow

      square of light.

      Hot August night

      I would move you far

      to music.

      GOING BACK

      How long, stone, did it take

      to get that fat?

      The rain made the furrow a rut

      and then among the mint and nettles

      you make your appearance.

      Sink again, you might cover bones.

      HITCHHIKING

      Awake:

      the white hand of

      my benefactor

      drums on the seat

      between us.

      The world had become orange

      in the rearview mirror

      of a ’55 Pontiac.

      The road was covered with bugs

      and mist coiled around

      great house-sized rocks

      and in the distance buried them.

      Village. Passed three limp

      gas stations then one

      whose windows exploded with fire.

      My mouth was filled with plastic cups.

      Final item:

      breakfast, nurtured

      by a miraculous hatred.

      SOUND

      At dawn I squat on the garage

      with snuff under a lip

      to sweeten the roofing nails—

      my shoes and pant cuffs

      are wet with dew.

      In the orchard the peach trees

      sway with the loud

      weight of birds, green fruit, yellow haze.

      And my hammer—the cold head taps,

      then swings its first full arc;

      the sound echoes against the barn,

      muffled in the loft,

      and out the other side, then lost

      in the noise of the birds

      as they burst from the trees.

      DEAD DEER

      Amid pale green milkweed, wild clover,

      a rotted deer

      curled, shaglike,

      after a winter so cold

      the trees split open.

      I think she couldn’t keep up with

      the others (they had no place

      to go) and her food,

      frozen grass and twigs,

      wouldn’t carry her weight.

      Now from bony sockets,

      she stares out on this

      cruel luxuriance.

      LI HO

      Li Ho of the province of Honan

      (not to be confused with the god Li Po

      of Kansu or Szechwan

      who made twenty thousand verses),

      Li Ho, whose mother said,

      My son daily vomits up his heart,

      mounts his horse and rides

      to where a temple lies as lace among foliage.

      His youth is bargained

      for some poems in his saddlebag—

      his beard is gray. Leaning

      against the flank of his horse he considers

      the flight of birds

      but his hands are heavy. (Take this cup,

      he thinks, fill it, I want to drink again.)

      Deep in his throat, but perhaps it is a bird,

      he hears a child cry.

      COMPLAINT

      Song, I am unused to you—

      When you come

      your voice is behind trees

      calling another by my name.

      So little of me comes out to you

      I cannot hold your weight—

      I bury you in sleep

      or pour more wine, or lost in another’s

      music, I forget that you ever spoke.

      If you come again, come with

      Elias! Elias! Elias!

      If only once the summons were a roar,

      a pillar of light,

      I would not betray you.

      RETURN

      The sun’s warm against the slats of the granary,

      a puddle of ice in the shadow of the steps;

      a bluetick hound lopes

      across the winter wheat—

      fresh green, cold green.

      The windmill, long out of use,

      screeches and twists in the wind.

      A spring day too loud for talk

      when bones tire of their flesh

      and want something better.

      LOCATIONS

      1968

      to Herbert Weisinger

      WALKING

      Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake

      into the first broad gully, down its trough

      and over a ridge of poplar, scrub oak, and into

      a larger gully, walking into the slow fresh warmth

      of midmorning to Spider Lake where I drank

      at a small spring remembered from ten years back;

      walking northwest two miles where another gully

      opened, seeing a stump on a knoll where my father

      stood one deer season, and tiring of sleet and cold

      burned a pine stump, the snow gathering fire-orange

      on a dull day; walking past charred stumps blackened

      by the ’81 fire to a great hollow stump near a basswood

      swale—I sat within it on a November morning

      watching deer browse beyond my young range of shotgun

      and slug, chest beating hard for killing—

      into the edge of a swale waist-high with ferns,

      seeing the quick movement of a blue racer,

      and thick curl of the snake against a birch log,

      a pale blue with nothing of the sky in it,

      a fleshy blue, blue of knotted veins in an arm;

      walking to Savage’s Lake where I ate my bread

      and cheese, drank cool lake water, and slept for a while,

      dreaming of fire, snake and fish and women in white

      linen walking, pinkish warm limbs beneath white linen;

      then walking, walking homeward toward Well’s Lake,

      brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening

      in yellow heat, dead dun-brown grass, windless,

      with all distant things shimmering, grasshoppers, birds

      dulled to quietness; walking a log road near a cedar swamp

      looking cool with green darkness and whine of mosquitoes,

      crow’s caw overhead, Cooper’s hawk floating singly

      in mateless haze; walking dumbly, footsore, cutting

      into evening through sumac and blackberry brambles,

      onto the lake road, feet sliding in the gravel,

      whippoorwills, night birds wakening, stumbling to lake

      shore, shedding clothes on sweet moss; walking

      into syrupy August moonless dark, water cold, pushing

      lily pads aside, walking out into the lake with feet

      springing on mucky bottom until the water flows overhead;

      sinking again to walk on the bottom then buoyed up,

      walking on the surface, moving through beds of reeds,

      snakes and frogs moving, to the far edge of the lake

      then walking upward over the basswood and alders, the field

      of sharp stubble and hay bales, toward the woods,

      floating over the bushy crests of hardwoods and tips

      of pine, barely touching in miles of rolling heavy dark,

      coming to the larger water, there walking along the troughs

      of waves folding in upon themselves; walking to an island,

      small, narrow, sandy, sparsely wooded, in the middle

      of the island in a clump of cedars a small spring

      which I enter, sliding far down into a deep cool

      dark endless weight of water.

      SUITE TO FATHERS

      for Denise Levertov

      I

      I think that night’s our balance,

      our counterweight—a blind woman

      we turn to for nothing but dark.

      In Val-Mont I see a slab of parchment,

      a black quill pen in stone.

      In a sculptor’s garden

      there was a head made from stone,

      large as a room, the eyes neatly hooded

      staring out with a crazed somnolence

      fond of walled gardens.

      The countesses arch like cats in châteaux.

      They wake up as countesses and usually sleep with counts.

      Nevertheless he writes them painful letters,

      thinking of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Gaspara Stampa.

      With Kappus he calls forth the stone in the rose.

      In Egypt the dhows sweep the Nile

      with ancient sails. I am in Egypt,

      he thinks, this Baltic jew—it is hot,

      how can I make bricks with no straw?

      His own country rich with her food and slaughter,

      fit only for sheep and generals.

      He thinks of the coffin of the East,

      of the tiers of dead in Venice,

      those countless singulars.

      At lunch, the baked apple too sweet with kirsch

      becomes the tongues of convent girls at gossip,

      under the drum and shadow of pigeons

      the girl at promenade has almond in her hair.

      From Duino, beneath the mist,

      the green is so dark and green it cannot bear itself.

      In the night, from black paper

      I cut the silhouette of this exiled god,

      finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.

      II

      In the cemetery the grass is pale,

      fake green as if dumped from Easter baskets,

      from overturned clay and the deeper marl

      which sits in wet gray heaps by the creek.

      There are no frogs, death drains there.

      Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ

      will quarry you after the worms.

      The newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.

      Above me, I feel paper birds.

      The sun is a brass bell.

      This is not earth I walk across

      but the pages of some giant magazine.

      Come song,

      allow me some eloquence,

      good people die.

      The June after you died

      I dove down into a lake,

      the water turned to cold, then colder,

      and ached against my ears.

      I swam under a sunken log then paused,

      letting my back rub against it,

      like some huge fish with rib cage

      and soft belly open to the bottom.

      I saw the light shimmering far above

      but did not want to rise.

      It was so far up from the dark—

      once it was night three days,

      after that four, then six and over again.

      The nest was torn from the tree,

      the tree from the ground,

      the ground itself sinking torn.

      I envied the dead their sleep of rot.

      I was a fable to myself,

      a speech to become meat.

      III

      Once in Nevada I sat on a boulder at twilight—

      I had no ride and wanted to avoid the snakes.

      I watched the full moon rise a fleshy red

      out of the mountains, out of a distant sandstorm.

      I thought then if I might travel deep enough

      I might embrace the dead as equals,

      not in their separate stillness as dead, but in music

      one with another’s harmonies.

      The moon became paler,

      rising, floating upward in her arc

      and I with her, intermingled in her whiteness,

      until at dawn again she bloodied

      herself with earth.

      In the beginning I trusted in spirits,

      slight things, those of the dead in procession,

      the household gods in mild delirium

      with their sweet round music and modest feasts.

      Now I listen only to that hard black core,

      a ball harsh as coal, rending for light

      far back in my own sour brain.

      The tongue knots itself

      a cramped fist of music,

      the oracle a white-walled room of bone

      that darkens now with a greater dark;

      and the brain a glacier of blood,

      inching forward, sliding, the bottom

      silt covered but sweet,

      becoming a river now

      laving the skull with coolness—

      the leaves on her surface

      dipping against the bone.

      Voyager, the self the voyage—

      dark, let me open your lids.

      Night stares down with her great bruised eye.

      SUITE TO APPLENESS

      I

      If you love me drink this discolored wine,

      tanning at the edge with the sourness of flowers—

      their heads, soldiers’, floating as flowers,

      heads, necks, owned by gravity now as war

      owned them and made them move to law;

      and the water is heavier than war, the heads

      bobbing freely there with each new wave lap.

      And if your arm offends you, cut it off.

      Then the leg by walking, tear out the eye,

      the trunk, body be eyeless, armless, bodiless.

      And if your brain offends you …

      If Christ offends you, tear him out,

      or if the earth offends you, skin her

      back in rolls, nailed to dry

      on barnside, an animal skin in sunlight;

      or the earth that girl’s head,

      throwing herself from the asylum roof,

      head and earth whirling earthward.

      Or if we reoccur with death our humus, heat,

      as growths or even mushrooms; on my belly

      I sight for them at dead-leaf line—

      no better way—thinking there that I hear

      the incredible itch of things to grow,

      Spring, soon to be billion-jetted.

      Earth in the boy’s hand, the girl’s head,

      standing against the granary; earth a green

      apple he picked to throw at starlings,

      plucked from among green underleaves,

      silver leaf bellies burred with fine white hairs;

      the apple hurled, hurtling greenly with wet solidity,

      earth spinning in upon herself,

      shedding her brains and whales and oceans,

      her mountains strewn and crushed.

      II

      In the Quonset shed unloading the fertilizer,

      each bag weighing eighty pounds,

      muscles ache, lungs choke with heat and nitrogen;

      then climbing the ladder of the water tank

      to see in the orchard the brightness of apples,

      sinking clothed into the icy water, feet thunking

      iron bottom, a circle of hot yellow light above.

      The old tree, a McIntosh:

      sixty-eight bushel last year,

      with seventy-three bushel the year before that,

      sitting up within it on a smooth branch,

      avoiding the hoe, invisible to the ground,

      buoyed up by apples, brain still shocked,

      warped, shaved into curls of paper,

      a wasps’ globe of gray paper—

      lamina of oil and clouds—

      now drawing in greenness, the apples

      swelling to heaviness on a hot August afternoon;

      to sing, singing, voice cracks at second sing,

      paper throat, brain unmoist for singing.

      Cranking the pump to loud life,

      the wheel three turns to the left,

      six hundred feet of pipe lying in the field;

      the ground beneath begins shaking, bumping

      with the force of coming water, sprinklers whirl,

      the ground darkening with spray of flung water.

      After the harvest of cabbage the cabbage roots,

      an acre of them and the discarded outer leaves,

      scaly pale green roots against black soil,

      to be forked into piles with the tomato vines;

      a warm week later throwing them onto the wagon,

      inside the piles the vines and leaves have rotted,

      losing shape, into a thick green slime and jelly.

      III

      Or in the orchard that night

      in July: the apple trees too thick

      with branches, unpruned, abandoned,

      to bear good fruit—the limbs

      moving slightly in still air with my drunkenness;

      a cloud passed over the moon

      sweeping the orchard with a shadow—

      the shadow moving thickly across the darkening field,

      a moving lustrous dark, toward a darker woodlot.

      Then the night exploded with crows—

      an owl or raccoon disturbed a nest—

      I saw them far off above the trees,

      small pieces of black in the moonlight

      in shrill fury circling with caw caw caw,

      skin prickling with its rawness

      brain swirling with their circling

      in recoil moving backward, crushing

      the fallen apples with my feet,

      the field moving then as the folds

      of a body with their caw caw caw.

      Young crows opened by owl’s beak,

      raccoon’s claws and teeth,

      night opened, brain broken as with a hammer

      by weight of blackness and crows,

      crushed apples and drunkenness.

      Or Christ bless torn Christ, crows,

      the lives of their young

      torn from the darkness,

      apples and the dead webbed branches

      choking the fruit;

      night and earth herself

      a drunken hammer, the girl’s head,

      all things bruised or crushed

      as an apple.

      THE SIGN

      I

      There are no magic numbers or magic lives.

      He dreams of Sagittarius in a thicket,

      dogs yipe at his hooves, the eye of the archer

      seaward, his gaze toward impossible things—

      bird to be fish, archer and horse a whale

      or dolphin; then rears up, canters

      away from the shore across a wide field

      of fern and honeysuckle brambles

      to a woods where he nibbles at small

      fresh leeks coming up among dead leaves.

      Strange creature to be thought of,

      welded in the skull as unicorn,

      hooves, bow, quiver of arrows and beard;

      that girl sitting at cliff edge

      or beside a brook, how does he take her?

      He lifts her up to kiss her,

      and at night standing by a stream,

      heavy mist up to his flanks,

      mist curling and floating through his legs,

      a chill comes over him;

      she in restless sleep in a small stone cottage.

      Between the scorpion and goat,

      three signs—

      winter in Cancer and this love of snow.

      And contempt for all signs, the nine

      spokes of the sun, the imagined belt

      of dark or girdle in which night

      mantles herself. The stars guide

      no one save those at sea

      or in the wilderness; avoid what stinks

      or causes pain, hate death and cruelty

      to any living thing.

      You do not need the stars for that.

      II

      But often at night something asks

      the brain to ride, run riderless;

      plumed night swirling, brain riding itself

      through blackness, crazed with motion,

      footless against the earth,

      perhaps hooves imagined in lunacy;

      through swamps feared even in daytime

      at gallop, crashing through poplar

      thickets, tamarack, pools of green slime,

      withers splattered with mud, breathing

      deep in an open marsh in the center of

      the great swamp, then running again

      toward a knoll of cedar where deer feed,

      pausing, stringing the bow, chasing

      the deer for miles, crossing a blacktop road

      where the hooves clatter.

      On a May night walking home from a tavern

      through a village with only three streetlights,

      a slip of moon and still air moist with scent of first grass;

      to look into the blackness by the roadside,

      and in all directions, village, forest,

      and field covered with it:

      eighteen miles of black to Traverse City

      thirteen miles of black to Buckley

      nineteen miles of black to Karlin

      twelve miles of black to Walton Junction

      And infinite black above;

      earth herself a heavy whirling ball of pitch.

      If the brain expands to cover these distances …

      stumbling to the porch where the cat

      has left an injured snake that hisses with the brain,

      the brain rearing up to shed the black

      and the snake coiled bleeding at its center.

      III

      Not centaur nor archer but man,

      man standing exhausted at night

      beneath a night sky so deep and measureless,

      head thrown back he sees his constellation,

      his brain fleshes it and draws the lines

      which begin to ripple then glimmer,

      heave and twist, assume color, rear up,

      the head high, the chest and torso gleaming,

      beard glistening, flanks strapped with muscle,

      hooves stomping in place, stomping night’s floor,

      rearing again, fading, then regaining terror,

      the bow in hand, a strung bow, and arrow fitted,

      drawn back, the arrow molten-tipped.

      Slay. He only still slays.

      And when the arrow reaches earth I’ll die.

      But in morning light, already shrill and hot

      by ten, digging a well pit, the sandy earth crumbles

      and traps the legs, binding them to earth; then digging

      again, driving a shallow well with a sledge,

      the well-tip shaded as an arrowhead, sledge hitting

      steel with metallic ring and scream; the pump head

      and arm bound to pipe, sitting in damp sand

      with legs around the pipe pumping the first water

      onto my chest and head—head swollen with pain

      of last night’s sign and leavings of whiskey.

      On another morning, the frost as a sheet

      of white stubbled silk soon to melt into greenness,

      partridge thumping ground with wings to call their mates,

      near a river, thick and turbulent and brown—

      a great buck deer, startled

      from a thicket, a stag of a thousand stories,

      how easily his spread antlers trace a back and bow

      not unlike your own, then the arc of him

      bounding away into his green clear music.

      WAR SUITE

      I

      The wars: we’re drawn to them

      as if in fever, we sleepwalk to them,

      wake up in full stride of nightmare,

      blood slippery, mouth deep in their gore.

      Even in Gilgamesh, the darker bodies

      strewn over stone battlements,

      dry skin against rough stone, the sand

      sifting through rock face, swollen flesh

      covered with it, sand against blackening lips,

      flesh covered with it, the bodies

      bloating in the heat, then hidden,

      then covered; or at an oasis, beneath

      still palms, a viper floats toward water,

      her soft belly flattened of its weight, tongue

      flicking at water beside the faces of the dead,

      their faces, chests, pressed to earth, bodies

      also flattened, lax with their weight,

      now surely groundlings, and the moon

      swollen in the night, the sheen

      of it on lax bodies and on the water.

      Now in Aquitaine, this man is no less dead

      for being noble, a knight with a clang

      and rasp to his shield and hammer;

      air thick with horses,

      earth fixed under their moving feet

      but bodies falling, sweat and blood

      under armor, death blows, sweet knight’s

      blood flowing, horses screaming, horses

      now riderless drinking at a brook, mouths sore

      with bits, sweat drying gray on flanks,

      noses dripping cool water, nibbling

      grass through bits, patches of grass

      with the blood still red and wet on them.

      II

      I sing sixty-seven wars; the war now,

      the war for Rapunzel, earth cannot use

      her hair, the war of drowning hair

      drifting upward as it descends,

      the lover holding his cock like

      a switchblade, war of

      apples and pears beating against the earth,

      earth tearing a hole in sky, air to hold

      the light it has gathered, river bending

      until its back is broken, death a black

      carp to swim in our innards.

      Grand wars; the final auk poised

      on her ice floe, the wolf shot

      from a helicopter; that shrill god

      in her choir loft among damp wine-colored

      crumpled robes, face against a dusty

      window, staring out at a black pond

      and the floor of a woodlot

      covered with ferns—if that wasp

      on the pane stings her …

      cancer to kill child, child to kill cancer,

      nail to enter the wood, the Virgin

      to flutter in the air above Rome like a Piper Cub,

      giraffe’s neck to grow after greener leaves,

      bullet to enter an eye, bullet

      to escape the skull, bullet to fall

      to earth, eye to look for its skull,

      skull to burst, belly to find its cage or ribs.

      Face down in the pool, his great fatty

      heart wants to keep beating; tongue pressed

      to rug in a chemical hallway; on a country

      road, caught by flashbulb headlights,

      he wishes suddenly to be stronger than a car.

      III

      The elephant to couple in peace,

      the porpoise to be free of the microphone;

      this page to know a master, a future,

      a page with the flesh melodious,

      to bring her up through the page, paper-shrouded,

      from whatever depth she lies,

      dulling her gift, bringing her to song

      and not to life.

      This death mask to harden before

      the face escapes, life passes

      down through the neck—the sculptor

      turns hearing it rub against the door.

      Mind to stay free of madness, of war;

      war all howling and stiff-necked dead,

      night of mind punctuated with moans and stars,

      black smoke moiling, puling mind striped as a zebra,

      ass in air madly stalking her lion.

      Fire to eat tar, tar to drip,

      hare to beat hound

      grouse to avoid shot

      trout to shake fly

      chest to draw breath

      breath to force song,

      a song to be heard,

      remembered and sung.

      To come to an opening in a field

      without pausing, to move there in a full circle of light;

      but night’s out there not even behind the glass—

      there’s nothing to keep her out or in;

      to walk backward to her, to step

      off her edge or become her edge,

      to swell and roll in her darkness,

      a landlocked sea moving free—

      dark and clear within her continent.

      AMERICAN GIRL

      I

      Not a new poem for Helen,

      if they were heaped …

      but she never wanted a poem,

      she whose affections the moment aimed.

      And not to sing a new Helen into being

      with t’adores, anachronistic gymnastics,

      to be diligent in praise of her

      only to be struck down by her.

      Sing then, if song,

      after bitter retreat,

      on your knees,

      as anyone who would love.

      My senses led me here

      and I had no wit to do otherwise.

      Who breathes. Has looked upon. Alone.

      In the darkness. Remembers.

      Better to sit as a boy did in a still

      cool attic in fall, tomatoes left to ripen

      in autumn light on newspapers,

      sucking his honeyed thumb, the forbidden

      magazine across the lap and only

      the mind’s own nakedness for company;

      the lovely photo, almost damp,

      as supple and pink to the eye,

      a hot country of body

      but unknown and distant,

      perhaps futureless.

      A child once thought the dead were buried

      to bear children: in the morning from his loft

      in the fumes of wood smoke and bacon

      he watches them dress, their bathing suits drying

      by the stove. The water will fill them up.

      II

      He dreams of Egypt in Sunday School,

      the maidens of Ur-of-Chaldea, Bathsheba bathing

      on her rooftop, the young virgin brought

      to David to warm his hollow bones. And the horror

      of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s frenzy

      with his daughters; women railed against

      in Habakkuk and Jeremiah, Isaiah’s feverish

      wife and Christ and the woman at the well—

      to look in lust is to do without doing;

      eyes follow

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