Classic and Contemporary Poetry
RETURNING TO EARTH, by JAMES HARRISON Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: She / pulls the sheet of this dance Last Line: Let the predator love his prey. Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim Subject(s): Aging; Despair; Introspection; Magic; United States; America | ||||||||
She pulls the sheet of this dance across me then runs, staking the corners far out at sea. ̺ ̺ ̺ So curious in the middle of America, the only "locus" I know, to live and love at great distance. (Growing up, everyone is willing to drive seventy miles to see a really big grain elevator, ninety miles for a dance, two hundred to look over a pair of Belgian mares returning the next day for the purchase, three hundred miles to see Hal Newhouser pitch in Detroit, eight hundred miles to see the Grand Ole Opry, a thousand miles to take the mongoloid kid to a Georgia faith healer.) I hitched two thousand for my first glimpse of the Pacific. When she first saw the Atlantic she said near Key Largo, "I thought it would be bigger." ̺ ̺ ̺ I widowed my small collection of magic until it poisoned itself with longing. I have learned nothing. I give orders to the rain. I tried to catch the tempest in a gill net. The stars seem a little closer lately. I'm no longer afraid to die but is this a guidepost of lunacy? I intend to see the ten hundred million worlds Manjushri passed through before he failed to awaken the maiden. Taking off and landing are the dangerous times. I was commanded in a dream to dance. ̺ ̺ ̺ O Faustus talks to himself, talks to himself, talks to himself, talks to himself, talks to himself, Faustus talks to himself, talks to himself. ̺ ̺ ̺ Ikkyu's ten years near the whorehouses shortens distances, is truly palpable; and in ten years you will surely get over your itch. Or not. ̺ ̺ ̺ Don't waste yourself staring at the moon. All of those moon-staring-rear-view-mirror deaths! Study the shadow of the horse turd in the grass. There must be a difference between looking at a picture of a bird and the actual bird (barn swallow) fifteen feet from my nose on the shed eaves. That cloud SSW looks like the underside of a river in the sky. ̺ ̺ ̺ O I'm lucky got a car that starts almost every day tho' I want a new yellow Chevy pickup got two letters today and I'd rather have three have a lovely wife but want all the pretty ones got three white hawks in the barn but want a Himalayan eagle have a planet in the basement but would prefer the moon in the granary have the northern lights but want the Southern Cross. ̺ ̺ ̺ The stillness of this earth which we pass through with the precise speed of our dreams. ̺ ̺ ̺ I'm getting very old. If I were a mutt in dog years I'd be seven, not stray so far. I am large. Tarpon my age are often large but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343. Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses, but I have dropped any notion of explaining to them why I read so much. To be mysterious is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered lately that my subjects do not live a life, but are life itself. They do not recognize the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship. To them I am pretty much a fellow creature. ̺ ̺ ̺ So distances: yearns for Guayaquil and Petersburg, the obvious Paris and Rome, restraint in the Cotswolds, perfumes of Arusha, Entebbe bristling with machine guns, also Ecuadorian & Ethiopian airports, border guards always whistling in boredom and playing with machine guns; all to count the flies on the lion's eyelids and the lioness hobbling in deep grass lacking one paw, to scan the marlin's caudal fin cutting the Humboldt swell, an impossible scissors. ̺ ̺ ̺ There must be a cricket named Zagreus in the granary tucked under a roof beam, under which my three-year-old daughter boogies madly, her first taste of the Grateful Dead; she is well out of her mind. ̺ ̺ ̺ Rain on the tin roof which covers a temple, rain on my walking head which covers a temple, rain covering my laugh shooting toward the woods for no reason, rain splattering in pasture's heat raising cones of dust, and off the horses' backs, on oriole's nest in ash tree, on my feet poking out the door, testing the endurance of our actual pains, biting hard against the sore tooth. ̺ ̺ ̺ She's rolling in the bear fat She's rolling in the sand She's climbing a vine She's boarding a jet She flies into the distance wearing blue shoes ̺ ̺ ̺ Having become the person I most feared in Childhood - A DRUNKARD. They were pointed out to us in our small town: oil workers, some poor farmers (on Saturday marketing), a mechanic, a fired teacher. They'd stumble when walking, sometimes yell on the street at noon, wreck their old cars; their wives would request special prayers in church, and the children often came to school in winter with no socks. We took up a collection to buy the dump-picker's daughter shoes. Also my uncles are prone to booze, also my father though it was well-controlled, and now my fifteen-year war with the bottle with whiskey removing me from the present in a sweet, laughing haze, removing anger, anxiety, instilling soft grandness, decorating ugliness and reaffirming my questionable worth. SEE: Olson's fingers touch his thumb, encircling the bottle - he gulps deeply, talking through one night into the next afternoon, talking, basking in Gorton's fishy odor. So many of my brethren seem to die of busted guts. Now there is a measured truce with maps and lines drawn elegantly against the binge, concessions, measurings, hesitant steps. My favorite two bars are just north and barely south of the 45th parallel. ̺ ̺ ̺ I no longer believe in the idea of magic, christs, the self, metal buddhas, bibles. A horse is only the space his horseness requires. If I pissed in the woods would a tree see my ear fall off and would the ear return to the body on the morning of the third day? Do bo trees ever remember the buddhas who've slept beneath them? I admit that yesterday I built an exploratory altar. Who can squash his delight in incomprehension? So on a piece of old newspaper I put an earthworm on a maple leaf, the remains of a bluebird after the cat was finished - head and feet, some dog hair, shavings from when we trimmed the horses' hooves, a snakeskin, a stalk of ragweed, a gourd, a lemon, a cedar splinter, a nonsymbolic doorknob, a bumblebee with his juice sucked out by a wasp. Before this altar I invented a doggerel mantra it is this it is this it is this ̺ ̺ ̺ It is very hard to give birds advice. They are already members of eternity. In their genes they have both compass and calendar. Their wing bones are hollow. We are surprised by how light a dead bird is. ̺ ̺ ̺ But what am I penetrating? Only that it seems nothing convinces itself or anyone else reliably of its presence. It is in the distance. ̺ ̺ ̺ No Persephone in my life, Ariadne, Helen, Pocahontas, Evangeline of the Book House but others not less extraordinary who step lightly into the dream life, refusing to leave: girl in a green dress, woman lolling in foot-deep Caribbean, woman on balcony near Vatican, girl floating across Copley Square in 1958, mythologized woman in hut in 1951, girl weeping in lilacs, woman slapping my face, girl smoking joint in bathtub looking at big toe, slender woman eating three lobsters, woman who blew out her heart with cocaine, girl livid and deformed in dreams, girl breaking the window in rage, woman sick in hotel room, heartless woman in photo - not heartless but a photo. ̺ ̺ ̺ My left eye is nearly blind. No words have ever been read with it. Not that the eye is virgin - thirty years ago it was punctured by glass. In everything it sees a pastel mist. The poster of Chief Joseph could be King Kong, Hong Kong, a naked lady riding a donkey into Salinas, Kansas. A war atrocity. This eye is the perfect art critic. This eye is a perfect lover saying bodies don't matter, it is the voice. This eye can make a lightbulb into the moon when it chooses. Once a year I open it to the full moon out in the pasture and yell, white light white light. ̺ ̺ ̺ A half-dozen times a day I climb through the electric fence on my way and back to my study in the barnyard. I have to be cautious. I have learned my true dimensions, how far my body sticks out from my brain. ̺ ̺ ̺ We are each the only world we are going to get. ̺ ̺ ̺ I don't want to die. It would certainly inconvenience my wife and daughters. I am sufficiently young that it would help my publisher unpack his warehouse of books. It would help me stop drinking and lose weight. I could talk to Boris Pasternak. He never saw the film. ̺ ̺ ̺ Wanting to pull the particular nail that will collapse the entire house so that there is nothing there, not even a foundation: a rubble heap, no sign at all, just grass, weeds and trees among which you cannot find a shard of masonry, which like an arrowhead might suggest an entire civilization. ̺ ̺ ̺ She was lying back in the rowboat. It was hot. She tickled me with her toes. She picked lily pads. She watched mating dragonflies. "How many fish below us?" "O a hundred or so." "It would be fun to fall in love with someone." The rower continued his rowing. ̺ ̺ ̺ Why be afraid of a process you're already able to describe with precision? To say you don't believe in it is to say that you're not. It doesn't care so why should you? You've been given your body back without a quarrel. See this vision of your imagined body float toward you: it disappears into you without a trace. You feel full with a fullness again. Your dimensions aren't scattered in dreams. ̺ ̺ ̺ This fat pet bird I've kept so many years, a crow with a malformed wing tucked against its side, no doubt a vestigial fin: I taught him early to drink from my whiskey or wineglass in the shed but he prefers wine. He flies only in circles of course but when he drinks he flies in great circles miles wide, preferring bad days with low cold clouds looking like leper brains. I barely hear his whimps & howls: O jesus the pain O shit it hurts O god let it end. He drags himself through air mostly landing near a screen door slamming, a baby's cry, a dog's bark, a forest fire, a sleeping coyote. These fabulous memories of earth! ̺ ̺ ̺ Not to live in fancy these short hours: let shadows fall from walls as shadows, nothing else. New York is exactly dead center in New York. Not to indulge this heartsickness as failure. Did I write three songs or seven or half-a-one, one line, phrases? A single word that might hang in the still, black air for more than a few moments? Then the laughter comes again. We sing it away. What short wicks we fuel with our blood. ̺ ̺ ̺ Disease! My prostate beating & pulsing down there like a frightened turkey's heart. ̺ ̺ ̺ A cold day, low ceiling. A cloud the size of a Greyhound bus just hit the house. ̺ ̺ ̺ Offenses this summer against Nature: poured iced tea on a garter snake's head as he or she dozed on the elm stump, pissed on a bumblebee (inattentive), kicked a thousand wasps to death in my slippers. Favors done this summer for Nature: let the mice keep their nest in the green station wagon, let Rachel the mare breathe her hot damp horse breath against my bare knee when she wanted to, tried without success to get the song sparrow out of the shed where she had trapped herself fluttering along the cranny under the assumption that the way out is always the way up, and her wings lie to her with each separate beat against the ceiling saying there is no way down and out, there is no way down and out, the open door back into the world. ̺ ̺ ̺ Coleridge's pet spider he says is very intellectual, spins webs of deceit straight out of his big hanging ass. ̺ ̺ ̺ Mandrill, Mandrillus sphinx, crest, mane, beard, yellow, purple, green, a large fierce, gregarious baboon -- has small wit but ties himself to a typewriter with wolfish and bloody appetite. He is just one, thousands will follow, something true to be found among the countless millions of typed pages. There's a picture of him in Tibet though no mandrills have been known to live there. He wants to be with his picture though there's no way to get there. So he types. So he dreams lupanar lupanar lupanar brothels with steam and white dust, music that describes undiscovered constellations so precisely the astronomers of the next century will know where to look. Peaches dripping light. Lupanar. The female arriving in dreams is unique, not another like her on earth; she's created for a moment. It only happens one time. One time O one time. He types. She's his only real food. O lupanar of dreams. ̺ ̺ ̺ Head bobbing right and left, with no effort and for the first time I see all sides of the pillar at once, the earth, her body. ̺ ̺ ̺ I can't jump high anymore. ̺ ̺ ̺ He tightens pumps in blue cold air gasoline the electricity from summer storms the seven-by-seven-foot blue face of lightning that shot down the gravel road like a ghost rocket. ̺ ̺ ̺ Saw the lord of crows late at night in my living room; don't know what true color of man -- black-white-red-yellow -- as he was hooded with the mask of a crow; arms, legs, with primary feathers sewn to leather downy black breast silver bells at wrist long feathered tail dancing for a moment or two then disappearing. Only in the morning did it occur to me that it was a woman. ̺ ̺ ̺ What sways us is not each other but our dumb insistent pulse beating I was I am I will I was sometimes operatic, then in church or barroom tenor, drunkenly, in prayer, slowly in the confusion of dreams but the same tripartite, the three of being here trailing off into itself, no finale any more than a beginning until all of us lie buried in the stupefying ache of caskets. ̺ ̺ ̺ This earth of intentions. Moonfucked, you can't eat or drink or sleep at ten feet. Kneeling, love is at nose tip. Or wound about each other our eyes forget that they are eyes and begin to see. You remember individual fence posts, fish, trees, ankles, from your tenth year. Those savages lacking other immediate alternatives screwed the ground to exhaustion. ̺ ̺ ̺ Bad art: walking away untouched, unmoving, barely tickled, amused, diverted killing time, throwing salt on the grass. The grace of Yukio Mishima's suicide intervening in the false harmony, Kawabata decides to live longer, also a harmony. In bad music, the cheapest and easiest way to get out of it infers Clapton. Eros girdled in metal and ozone. A man in a vacuum of images, stirring his skull with his dick, sparing himself his future, fancy bound, unparticular, unpeculiar, following the strings of his dreaming to more dreaming in a sump narcosis, never having given himself over to his life, never owning an instant. ̺ ̺ ̺ Week's eating log: whitefish poached with lemon, onion, wine, garlic; Chulapa -- pork roasted twelve hours with pinto beans, red peppers, chili powder; grilled twenty-two pounds of beef ribs for friends; a lamb leg pasted with Dijon mustard, soy, garlic; Chinese pork ribs; menudo just for Benny & me as no one else would eat it -- had to cook tripe five hours then mix with hominy and peppers with chorizo tacos on the side; copious fresh vegetables, Burgundy, Columbard, booze with all of the above; at night fevered dreams of her sumptuous butt, a Mercator projection, the map of an enormous meal in my brain. Still trying to lose weight. ̺ ̺ ̺ How strange to see a horse stare straight up. ̺ ̺ ̺ Everything is a good idea at the time. Staring with stupid longing at a picture, dumbstruck as they used to call it, an instant's whimsy; a body needlessly unlike any other's, deserved by someone so monstrous as Lucrezia Borgia: how do you come to terms with it? thinks the American. You don't, terms being a financial word not applicable to bodies. Wisdom shies away, the packhorse startled at the diamondback beneath the mesquite, the beauty of threat. Now look at her as surely as that other beast, the dead crow beneath the apple tree so beautiful in its black glossiness but without eyes, feet stiff and cool as the air. I watched it for a year and owned its bleached shinbone but gave it to someone who needed the shinbone of a crow. ̺ ̺ ̺ She says it's too hot, the night's too short, that I'm too drunk, but it's not too anything, ever. ̺ ̺ ̺ Living all my life with a totally normal-sized dick (cf. the authorities: Van de Velde, Masters & Johnson) neither hedgehog or horse, neither emu or elephant (saw one in Kenya, the girls said O my goodness) neither wharf rat, arrogant buck dinosaur, prepotent swan, ground squirrel, Lauxmont Admiral famous Holstein bull who sired 200,000 artificially. I am saved from trying to punish anyone, from confusing it with a gun, harpoon, cannon, sword, cudgel, Louisville Slugger. It just sits there in the dark, shy and friendly like the new kid at school. ̺ ̺ ̺ In our poetry we want to rub our nose hard into whatever is before it; to purge these dreams of pictures, photos, phantom people. She offers a flex of butt, belly button, breasts, slight puff of veneris, gap in teeth often capped, grace of knees, high cheekbones and neck, all the thickness of paper. The grandest illusion as in ten thousand movies in all those hours of dark, the only true sound the exploding popcorn and the dairy fetor of butter. After the movie a stack of magazines at the drugstore to filter through, to be filtered through. ̺ ̺ ̺ A choral piece for a dead dog: how real the orchestra and hundred voices on my lawn; pagan with the dog on a high cedar platform to give the fire its full marriage of air; the chorus sings DOG a thousand times, dancing in a circle. That would be a proper dog funeral. By god. No dreams here but a mighty shouting of dog. ̺ ̺ ̺ Sunday night, I'm lucky to have all of this vodka, a gift of Stolichnaya. And books. And a radio playing WSM all the way from Nashville. Four new pups in the bedroom. The house snores. My tooth aches. It is time to fry an egg. ̺ ̺ ̺ Heard the foghorn out at sea, saw horses' backs shiny with rain, felt my belly jiggle as I walked through the barnyard in a light rain with my daughter's small red umbrella to protect the not-very-precious manuscript, tiptoeing barefoot in the tall wet grass trying to avoid the snakes. ̺ ̺ ̺ With all this rain the pond is full. The ducks are one week old and already speak their language perfectly -- a soft nasal hiss. With no instructions they skim bugs from the pond's surface and look fearfully at me. ̺ ̺ ̺ The minister whacks off as does the insurance man, habitual golfer, sweet lady in her bower, as do novelists, monks, nuns in nunneries, maidens in dormitories, stallion against fence post, goat against puzzled pig who does not cease feeding, and so do senators, generals, wives during TV game shows, movie stars and football players, students to utter distraction, teachers, butchers, world leaders, everyone except poets who fear the dreaded growth of hair on the palms, blindness. They know that even in an empty hotel room in South Dakota that someone is watching. ̺ ̺ ̺ With my dog I watched a single crow fly across the field. We are each one. ̺ ̺ ̺ Thirty feet up in the air near the top of my novel I want a bird to sing from the crown of the barn roof. A hundred feet away there is a grove of trees, maple and elm and ash, placed quite accidentally before any of us were born. Everyone remembers who planted the lilacs forty years and three wars ago. ̺ ̺ ̺ In the morning paper the arsonist who was also a paranoid schizophrenic, a homosexual, retarded, an alcoholic who lacerated his body with a penknife and most significantly for the rest of us, started fires where none where desired, on whim. ̺ ̺ ̺ Spent months regathering dreams lost in the diaspora, all of the prism's colors, birds, animals, bodies, getting them back within the skin where they'd do no damage. How difficult catching them armed only with a butterfly-catcher's net, a gun, airplane, an ice pick, a chalice of rainwater, a green headless buddha on loan from a veteran of foreign wars. ̺ ̺ ̺ Saw that third eye in a dream but couldn't remember if it looked from a hole in a wall of ice, or a hole in a floor of ice, but it was an eye looking from a hole in ice. ̺ ̺ ̺ Two white-faced cattle out in the dark-green pasture, one in the shade of the woodlot, one out in the hot sunlight, eating slowly and staring at each other. ̺ ̺ ̺ So exhausted after my walk from orchestrating the moves of one billion August grasshoppers plus fifty thousand butterflies swimming at the heads of fifty thousand wildflowers red blue yellow orange orange flowers the only things that rhyme with orange the one rabbit in the pasture one fly buzzing at the window a single hot wind through the window a man sitting at my desk resembling me. ̺ ̺ ̺ He sneaks up on the temple slowly at noon. He's so slow it seems like it's taking years. Now his hands are on a pillar, the fingers encircling it, with only the tips inside the gate. ̺ ̺ ̺ After all of this long moist dreaming I perceive how accurate the rooster's crow is from down the road. ̺ ̺ ̺ You can suffer and not even know you're suffering because you've been suffering so long you can't remember another life. You're actually a dead dog on a country road. And a man gets used to his rotten foot. After a while it's simply a rotten foot, and his rotten ideas are even easier to get used to because they don't hurt as much as a rotten foot. The road from Belsen to Watergate paved with perfectly comfortable ideas, ideas to sleep on like a mattress stuffed with money and death, an actual waterbed filled with liquid gold. So our inept tuna cravings and Japan's (she imitates our foulest features) cost an annual 250,000 particular dolphin deaths, certainly as dear as people to themselves or so the evidence says. ̺ ̺ ̺ Near my lover's old frame house with a field behind it, the grass is a brilliant gold. Standing on the gravel road before the house a great flock of blackbirds coming over so close to my head I see them all individually, eyes, crests, the feet drawn out in flight. ̺ ̺ ̺ I owe the dentist nine hundred dollars. This is more than I made on three of my books of poems. But then I am gloriously free. I can let my mouth rot and quit writing poems. I could let the dentist write the poems while I walked into the dark with a tray of golden teeth I'd sculpt for myself in the forms of shark's teeth, lion's teeth, teeth of grizzly and python. Watch me open my mouth as I wear these wondrous teeth. The audience gross is exactly nine hundred! The house lights dim. My lips part. There is a glimpse of sun. ̺ ̺ ̺ Abel always votes. Cain usually thinks better of it knowing not very deep in his heart that no one deserves to be encouraged. Abel has a good job & is a responsible screw, but many intelligent women seem drawn to Crazy Horse, a descendant of Cain, even if he only gets off his buffalo pony once a year to throw stones at the moon. Of course these women marry Abel but at bars and parties they are the first to turn to the opening door to see who is coming in. ̺ ̺ ̺ I was standing near the mow door in the darkness, a party going on in the chateau. She was there with her sister. We kissed then lay down on fresh straw in a paddock. An angry stallion jumped over on top of us. I could see his outline clearly against the sky. Why did we die so long ago. ̺ ̺ ̺ How wind, cloud and water blaspheme symmetry at every instant, forms that can't be remembered and stored: Grand Marais, Cape Ann at Eastern Point, Lake Manyara from a cliff, Boca Grande's sharks giving still water a moving shape -- they are there and there and there -- the waterfall next to a girl so obviously on a white horse, to mud puddle cat avoids, back to Halibut Point, Manitou convulsed in storms to thousand-mile weed line in Sargasso Sea to brown violent confluence of Orinoco and ocean off Devil's Gate; mixing wind, cloud, water, the purest mathematics of their description studied as glyphs, alchemists everywhere working with humble gold, somewhere to begin, having to keep eyes closed to wind, cloud, water. ̺ ̺ ̺ Saw an ox. A black horse I recognized. A procession of carts full of flowers pulled by nothing. Asymmetrical planets. Fish out of their element of water. Simple music -- a single note an hour. How are we to hear it, if at all? No music in statement, the lowest denominator by which our fragments can't find each other. But I can still hear the notes of April, the strained, fragile notes of March: convalescent, tentative, a weak drink taken over and over in immense doses. It is the body that is the suite entire, brain firmly fused to the trunk, spine more actual than mountains, brain moving as a river, governed precisely by her energies. ̺ ̺ ̺ Whippoorwill. Mourning dove. Hot morning rain changing to a violent squall coming SSW out of the lake, thunder enveloping itself then unfolding as cloth in wind furls, holds back, furls again; running nearly naked in shorts to my shed, thunder rattling windows and walls, acorns rattling against barn's tin roof; the floor shudders, then stillness as squall passes, as strange as a strong wind at summer twilight when the air is yellow. Now cool still air. Mourning dove. Oriole. ̺ ̺ ̺ O my darling sister O she crossed over she's crossed over is planted now near her father six feet under earth's skin - their still point on this whirling earth now and I think forever. ̺ ̺ ̺ Now it is as close to you as the clothes you wear. The clothes are attached to your body by a cord that runs up your spine, out your neck and through the earth, back up your spine. ̺ ̺ ̺ At nineteen I began to degenerate, slight smell of death in my gestures, unbelieving, tentative, wailing... so nineteen years have gone. It doesn't matter. It might have taken fifty. Or never. Now the barriers are dissolving, the stone fences in shambles. I want to have my life in cloud shapes, water shapes, wind shapes, crow call, marsh hawk swooping over grass and weed tips. Let the scavenger take what he finds. Let the predator love his prey. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...JULY FOURTH BY THE OCEAN by ROBINSON JEFFERS SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC by ROBINSON JEFFERS SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC by ROBINSON JEFFERS WATCH THE LIGHTS FADE by ROBINSON JEFFERS AFTER TENNYSON by AMBROSE BIERCE MEETING YOU AT THE PIERS by KENNETH KOCH INVOCATION TO THE SOCIAL MUSE by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH THE IDEA OF BALANCE IS TO BE FOUND IN HERONS AND LOONS by JAMES HARRISON |
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