Classic and Contemporary Poetry
LOCATIONS, by JAMES HARRISON Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: In the end you are tired of those places Last Line: Beyond, a green continent. Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim Subject(s): Death; Desire; Love; Memory; Travel; Dead, The; Journeys; Trips | ||||||||
I want this hardened arm to stop dragging a cherished image. -- RIMBAUD In the end you are tired of those places, you're thirty, your only perfect three, you'll never own another thing. At night you caress them as if the tongue turned inward could soothe, head lolling in its nest of dark, the heart fibrotic, inedible. Say that on some polar night an Eskimo thinks of his igloo roof, the blocks of ice sculptured to keep out air, as the roof of his skull; all that he is, has seen, is pictured there -- thigh with the texture of the moon, whale's tooth burnished from use as nothing, fixtures of place, some delicate as a young child's ear, close as snails to earth, beneath the earth as earthworms, farther beneath as molten rock, into the hollow, vaulted place, pure heat and pure whiteness, where earth's center dwells. You were in Harar but only for a moment, rifles jostling blue barrels against blue barrels in the oxcart, a round crater, hot, brown, a bowl of hell covered with dust. The angels you sensed in your youth smelled strongly as a rattlesnake smells of rotten cucumber, the bear rising in the glade of ferns of hot fur and sweat, dry ashes pissed upon. You squandered your time as a mirror, you kept airplanes from crashing at your doorstep, they lifted themselves heavily to avoid your sign, fizzling like matches in the Atlantic. You look at Betelgeuse for the splendor of her name but she inflames another universe. Our smallest of suns barely touches earth in the Gobi, Sahara, Mojave, Mato Grosso. Dumb salvages: there is a box made of wood, cavernous, all good things are kept there, and if the branches of ice that claw against the window become hands, that is their business. Yuma is an unbearable place. The food has fire in it as does the brazero's daughter who serves the food in an orange dress the color of a mussel's lip. Outside it is hot as the crevasse of her buttocks -- perfect body temperature. You have no idea where your body stops and the heat begins. On Lake Superior the undertow swallows a child and no one notices until evening. They often drown in the green water of abandoned gravel pits, or fall into earth where the crust is thin. I have tried to stop the war. You wanted to be a sculptor creating a new shape that would exalt itself as the shape of a ball or hand or breast or dog or hoof, paw print in snow, each cluster of grapes vaguely different, bat's wing shaped as half a leaf, a lake working against its rim of ground. You wear yellow this year for Christmas, the color of Christ's wounds after three days, the color of Nelse's jacket you wear when writing, Nelse full of Guckenheimer, sloth, herring, tubercles. There were sweet places to sleep: beds warmed by women who get up to work or in the brush beneath Coit Tower, on picnic tables in Fallon, Nevada, and Hastings, Nebraska, surrounded by giant curs, then dew that falls like fine ice upon your face in a bean field near Stockton, near a waterfall in the Huron Mountains, memorable sleeps in the bus stations of San Jose and Toledo, Ohio. At a roller rink on Chippewa Lake the skaters move to calliope music. You watch a motorboat putt by the dock, they are trolling for bass at night and for a moment the boat and the two men are caught in the blue light of the rink, then pass on slowly upon the black water. Liquor has reduced you to thumbnails, keratin, the scales of fish your ancient relatives, stranded in a rock pool. O claritas, sweet suppleness of breath, love within a cloud that blinds us hear, speak, the world without. Grove St., Gough St., Heber, Utah, one in despair, two in disgust, the third beneath the shadow of a mountain wall, beyond the roar of a diesel truck, faintly the screech of lion. Self-immolation, the heaviest of dreams -- you become a charcoal rick for Christ, for man himself. They laugh with you as you disappear lying as a black log upon the cement, the fire doused by your own blood. The thunderstorm moved across the lake in a sheet of rain, the lightning struck a strawpile, which burned in the night with hot roars of energy as in '48 when a jet plane crashed near town, the pilot parachuting as a leaf through the red sky, landing miles away, missing the fire. There was one sun, one cloud, two horses running, a leopard in chase; only the one sun and a single cloud a third across her face. Above, the twelve moons of Jupiter hissing in cold and darkness. You worshiped the hindquarters of beautiful women, and the beautiful hindquarters of women who were not beautiful; the test was the hindquarters as your father judged cattle. He is standing behind a plow in a yellow photograph, a gangster hat to the back of his head, in an undershirt with narrow straps, reins over a shoulder waiting for the photo, the horses with a foreleg raised, waiting for the pull with impatience. The cannon on the courthouse lawn was plugged, useless against the japs. In the dark barn a stillborn calf on the straw, rope to hooves, its mother bawling pulled nearly to death. You've never been across the ocean, you swept the auditorium with a broom after the travel lectures and dreamed of going but the maps have become old, the brain set on the Mackenzie River, even Greenland where dentists stalk polar bears from Cessnas. The wrecked train smelled of camphor, a bird floating softly above the steam, the door of the refrigerator car cracked open and food begins to perish in the summer night. You've become sure that every year the sky descends a little, but there is joy in this pressure, joy bumping against the lid like a demented fly, a bird breaking its neck against a picture window while outside new gods roll over in the snow in billowy sleep. The oil workers sit on the curb in front of the Blue Moon Bar & Cafe, their necks red from the sun, pale white beneath the collars or above the sleeves; in the distance you hear the clumping of the wells. And at a friend's house there are aunts and uncles, supper plates of red beans and pork, a guitar is taken from the wall - in the music the urge of homesickness, a peach not to be held or a woman so lovely but not to be touched, some former shabby home far south of here, in a warmer place. Cold cement, a little snow upon it. Where are the small gods who bless cells? There are only men. Once you were in a room with a girl of honey-colored hair, the yellow sun streamed down air of yellow straw. You owe it to yourself to despise this place, the walls sift black powder; you owe yourself a particular cave. You wait for her, a stone in loamy stillness, who will arrive with less pitiful secrets from sidereal reaches, from other planets of the mind, who beneath the chamber music of gown and incense will reflect the damp sweetness of a cave. At that farm there were so many hogs, in the center of the pen in the chilled air he straddles the pig and slits its throat, blood gushes forth too dark to be blood, gutted, singed, and scraped into pinkness - there are too many bowels, the organs too large, pale sponges that are lungs, the pink is too pink to understand. This is earth I've fallen against, there was no life before this; still icon as if seen through mist, cold liquid sun, blue falling from the air, foam of ship's prow cutting water, a green shore beyond the rocks; beyond, a green continent. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...RICHARD, WHAT'S THAT NOISE? by RICHARD HOWARD LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by RICHARD BLANCO RIVERS INTO SEAS by LYNDA HULL DESTINATIONS by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN THE ONE WHO WAS DIFFERENT by RANDALL JARRELL THE CONFESSION OF ST. JIM-RALPH by DENIS JOHNSON SESTINA: TRAVEL NOTES by WELDON KEES TO H. B. (WITH A BOOK OF VERSE) by MAURICE BARING THE IDEA OF BALANCE IS TO BE FOUND IN HERONS AND LOONS by JAMES HARRISON |
|