Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LETTERS TO YESENIN: 6, by JAMES HARRISON


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LETTERS TO YESENIN: 6, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple
Last Line: All must pass as a monk's tale, a future lie.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Drinks & Drinking; Sex; Yesenin, Sergei (1895-1925); Wine


Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple. The sun was hot and I
felt an unbounded sickness with earth. A single October day began to last a
year. You can't fuck your life away, I thought. But you can! Listening in
Nepal to those peahens scream in the evening. Then, through the glade, lordly
he enters, his ass a ten-foot fan, a painting by a crazed old master. Look,
they are human. Heads the size of two knuckles. But returning to her buttery
appleness and autumn, my dead friend. We cannot give our lives over to women.
Kneeling there under that vulgar sugar maple tree I couldn't breathe and with a
hundred variations of red above me and against my mouth. She said I'm going
away to Oregon perhaps. I said that I'm going myself to California where I hear
they sleep out every night. So that ended that and the fan was tucked neatly
and the peahens' screams were heard no more in the land and old ladies and old
men slept soundly again and threw away their cotton earplugs and the earth of
course was soaked with salt and August passed without a single ear of corn. Of
course this was only one neighborhood. Universality is disgusting. But you had
your own truly insurmountable horrors with that dancer, lacking all wisdom as
you did. Your critic said you were "often revolted by your sensuality." He
means all of that endless fucking of course. Tsk tsk. Put one measure against
another and how rarely they fuse, and how almost never is there any fire and how
often there is only boredom and a craving for cigarettes, a sandwich, or a
drink. Particularly a drink. I am drunk because I no longer can love. I make
love and I'm writing on a blackboard. Once it was a toteboard, a gun handle
until I myself became a notch. And a notch, to be obvious, is a nothing. This
all must pass as a monk's tale, a future lie.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net