Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LETTERS TO YESENIN: 9, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LETTERS TO YESENIN: 9, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: What if I own more paper clips than I'll ever use in this
Last Line: Beautiful duck and my time is free again.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Introspection; Poverty; Property; Yesenin, Sergei (1895-1925); Possessions


What if I own more paper clips than I'll ever use in this lifetime? My other
possessions are shabby: the house half-painted, the car without a muffler, one
dog with bad eyes and the other dog a horny moron. Even the baby has a rash on
her neck but then we don't own humans. My good books were stolen at parties
long ago and two of the barn windows are broken and the furnace is unreliable
and field mice daily feed on the wiring. But the new foal appears healthy
though unmanageable, crawling under the fence and chased by my wife who is
stricken by the flu, not to speak of my own body which has long suffered the
ravages of drink and various nervous disorders that make me laugh and weep and
caress my shotguns. But paper clips. Rich in paper clips to sort my writings
which fill so many cartons under the bed. When I attach them I say it's your
job after all to keep this whole thing together. And I used them once with a
rubber band to fire holes into the face of the president hanging on the office
wall. We have freedom. You couldn't do that to Brezhnev much less Stalin on
whose grave Mandelstam sits proudly in the form of the ultimate crow, a peerless
crow, a crow without comparison on earth. But the paper clips are a small
comfort like meeting someone fatter than myself and we both wordlessly recognize
the fact or meeting someone my age who is more of a drunk, more savaged and hag-
ridden until they are no longer human and seeing them on the street I wonder how
their heads which are only wounds balance on the top of their bodies. A
manuscript of a novel sits in front of me held together with twenty clips. It is
the paper equivalent of a duck and a company far away has bought this perhaps
beautiful duck and my time is free again.





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