Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LETTERS TO YESENIN: 29, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LETTERS TO YESENIN: 29, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: We're nearing the end of this homage that often resembles a
Last Line: Single green month to go from the closest to so far from death.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Death; Imaginary Conversations; Yesenin, Sergei (1895-1925); Dead, The


We're nearing the end of this homage that often resembles a suicide note to a
suicide. I didn't mean it that way but how often our hands sneak up on our
throats and catch us unaware. What are you doing here we say. Don't squeeze so
hard. The hands inside the vodka bottle and on the accelerator, needles and
cokesore noses. It's not very attractive, is it? But now there is rain on the
tin roof, the world outside is green and leafy with bluebirds this morning dive-
bombing drowning worms from a telephone wire, the baby laughing as the dog eats
the thirty-third snake of the summer. And the bodies on the streets and
beaches. Girl bottoms! Holy. Tummies in the sun! Very probably holy. Peach
evidence almost struggling for air! A libidinal stew that calls us to life
however ancient and basal. May they plug their lovely ears with their big toes.
God surely loves them to make them look that way and can I do less than He at
least in this respect. As my humble country father said in our first birds-and-
bees talk so many years ago: "That thing ain't just to pee through." This
vulgarity saves us as certainly as our chauvinism. Just now in midafternoon I
wanted a tumbler of wine but John Calvin said, "You got up at noon. No wine
until you get your work done. You haven't done your exercises to suppress the
gut the newspaper says women find most disgusting. The fence isn't mended and
the neighbor's cow keeps crawling through in the night, stealing the fresh
clover you are saving for Rachel the mare when she drops her foal." So the wine
bottle remains corked and Calvin slips through the floorboards to the crawl
space where he spends all of his time hating his body. Would these concerns
have saved you? Two daughters and a wife. Children prop our rotting bodies
with cries of earn earn earn. On occasion we are kissed. So odd in a
single green month to go from the closest to so far from death.





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