Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A YEAR'S CHANGES, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A YEAR'S CHANGES, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: This nadir: the wet hole
Last Line: Or return to draw me back to a home.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Death; Nature; Winter; Dead, The


This nadir: the wet hole
in which a beast heaps twigs and bits
of hair, bark and tree skin,
both food and turds mix in the warm
dust its body makes.
In winter the dream of summer,
in summer the dream of sleep,
in spring feasting,
living dreams through the morning.
Fall, my cancer, pared to bone,
I lost my fur, my bite gone dull,
all edges, red and showing; now naked,
February painted with ice, preserve me
in wakefulness -- I wait for the rain,
to see a red pine free of snow,
my body uncrabbed, unleashed,
my brain alive.

̺ ̺ ̺

In northern Manitoba
a man saw a great bald eagle --
hanging from its neck,
teeth locked in skin and feathers,
the bleached skull of a weasel.

̺ ̺ ̺

To sing not instinct or tact,
wisdom,
the song's full stop and death,
but audible things, things moving
at noon in full raw light;
a dog moving around
the tree with the shade -
shade and dog in motion -
alive at noon in full natural light.

̺ ̺ ̺

This nightflower, the size of a cat's head -
now moist and sentient -
let it hang there in the dark;
bare beauty asking nothing of us,
if we could graft you to us,
so singular and married to the instant.
But now rest picked, a trillium
never to repeat yourself. Soon enough
you'll know dead air, brief homage,
a sliver of glass in someone's brain.

̺ ̺ ̺

Homesick for a dark, clear black space
free of objects; to feel locked as wood
within a tree, a rock deep enough
in earth never to see the surface.

̺ ̺ ̺

Snow. There's no earth left under it.
It's too cold to breathe.
Teeth ache, trees crack, the air is bluish.
My breath goes straight up.
This woods is so quiet
that if it weren't for the buffer of trees
I could hear everything on earth.

̺ ̺ ̺

Only talk. Cloth after the pattern is cut,
discarded, spare wood barely kindling.
At night when the god in you trips,
hee-haws, barks and refuses to come
to tether. Stalk without quarry.
Yesterday I fired a rifle into the lake.

̺ ̺ ̺

A cold spring dawn
near Parker Creek,
a doe bounding away through
shoulder-high fog
fairly floating,
soundless
as if she were running in a cloud.

̺ ̺ ̺

That his death was disfigurement:
at impact when light passed
the cells yawned then froze in postures
unlike their former selves, teeth
stuck by the glue of their blood
to windshields, visors. And in the night,
a quiet snowy landscape, three bodies
slump, horribly rended.

̺ ̺ ̺

Acacia Accidie Accipiter
flower boredom flight
gummy wet pale stemmed
barely above root level
and darkened by ferns;
but hawk
high now spots the car he shot
and left there,
swings low
in narrowing circles,
feeds.

̺ ̺ ̺

My mouth stuffed up with snow,
nothing in me moves,
earth nudges all things this month.
I've outgrown this shell
I found in a sea of ice -
its drunken convolutions -
something should call me to another life.

̺ ̺ ̺

Too cold for late May, snow flurries,
warblers tight in their trees, the air
with winter's clearness, dull
pearlish clear under clouds, clean
clear bite of wind, silver maple flexing
in the wind, wind rippling petals,
ripped from flowering crab,
pale pink against green firs, the body
chilled, blood unstirred, thick with frost:
body be snake,
self equal to ground heat,
be wind cold, earth heated,
bend with tree, whip with grass,
move free clean and bright clear.

̺ ̺ ̺

Night draws on him until he's soft
and blackened, he waits for bones
sharp-edged as broken stone, rubble
in a deserted quarry, to defoliate,
come clean and bare
come clean and dry,
for salt,
he waits for salt.

̺ ̺ ̺

In the dark I think of the fire,
how hot the shed was when it burned,
the layers of tar paper and dry pine,
the fruit-like billows and blue embers,
the exhausted smell as of a creature
beginning to stink when it has no more to eat.

̺ ̺ ̺

The doe shot in the back
and just below the shoulder
has her heart and lungs blown out.
In the last crazed seconds she leaves
a circle of blood on the snow.
An hour later we eat
her still-warm liver for lunch,
fried in butter with onions.
In the evening we roast
her loins, and drink two gallons of wine,
reeling drunken and yelling on the snow.
Jon Jackson will eat venison for a month,
he has no job, food or money,
and his pump and well are frozen.

̺ ̺ ̺

June, sun high, nearly straight above,
all green things in short weak shadow;
clipping acres of pine for someone's
Christmas, forearms sore with trimming,
itching with heat -
drawing boughs away from a trunk
a branch confused with the thick
ugliness of a hognose snake.

̺ ̺ ̺

Dogged days, dull, unflowering,
the mind petaled in cold wet dark;
outside the orange world is gray,
all things gray turned in upon
themselves in the globed eye of the seer -
gray seen.
But the orange world is orange to itself,
the war continues redly,
the moon is up in Asia,
the dark is only eight thousand miles deep.

̺ ̺ ̺

At the edge of the swamp a thorn apple tree
beneath which partridge feed on red berries,
and an elm tipped over in a storm
opening a circle of earth formerly closed,
huge elm roots in a watery place, bare,
wet, as if there were some lid to let
secrets out or a place where the ground
herself begins, then grows outward
to surround the earth; the hole, a black
pool of quiet water, the white roots
of undergrowth. It appears bottomless,
an oracle I should worship at; I want
some part of me to be lost in it and return
again from its darkness, changing the creature,
or return to draw me back to a home.





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