Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SULLIVAN POEM, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SULLIVAN POEM, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: March 5: first day without a fire
Last Line: Moves through our bodies as if we were gods.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Memory; Mourning; Bereavement


March 5: first day without a fire.
Too early. Too early. Too early!
Take joy in the day
without consideration, the three
newly-brought-to-life bugs
who are not meant to know
what they are doing avoid each other
on windows stained
by a dozen storms.

We eat our father's food:
herring, beans, salt pork,
sauerkraut, pig hocks, salt cod.
I have said good-bye with one thousand
laments so that even the heart of the rose
becomes empty as my dog's rubber ball.
The dead are not meant to go,
but to trail off so that one can
see them on a distant hillock,
across the river, in dreams
from which one awakens nearly healed:
don't worry, it's fine to be dead,
they say; we were a little early
but could not help ourselves.
Everyone dies as the child they were,
and at the moment, this secret,
intricately concealed heart blooms
forth with the first song anyone
sang in the dark, "Now I lay me
down to sleep, I pray the Lord
my soul to keep..."

Now this oddly gentle winter, almost dulcet,
winds to a blurred close with trees full
of birds that belong farther south,
and people are missing something
to complain about; a violent March
is an unacknowledged prayer;
a rape of nature, a healing blizzard,
a very near disaster.

So this last lament:
as unknowable as the eye of the crow
staring down from the walnut tree,
blind as the Magellanic clouds,
as cold as that March mud puddle
at the foot of the granary steps,
unseeable as the birthright of the LA
whore's Nebraska childhood of lilacs
and cornfields and an unnamed prairie
bird that lived in a thicket
where she hid,
as treacherous as a pond's spring
ice to a child,
black as the scar of a half-peeled
birch tree,
the wrench of the beast's heart just
short of the waterhole,
as bell-clear as a gunshot at dawn,
is the ache of a father's death.

It is that, but far more:
as if we take a voyage out of life
as surely as we took a voyage in,
almost as frightened children
in a cellar's cold gray air;
or before memory -- they put me on a boat
on this river, then I was lifted off;
in our hearts, it is always just after
dawn, and each bird's song is the first,
and that ever-so-slight breeze that touches
the tops of trees and ripples the lake
moves through our bodies as if we were gods.





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