Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TIME SUITE, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TIME SUITE, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Just seven weeks ago in paris
Last Line: Amen.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Change; Time


Just seven weeks ago in Paris
I read Chuang Tzu in my dreams
and remembered once again
we are only here for a moment,
not very wild mushrooms,
just cartoon creatures that are blown apart
and only think they are put back together,
housepets within a house fire of impermanence.
In this cold cellar we see light
without knowing it is out of reach;
not to be owned but earned
moment by moment.
But still at dawn
in the middle of Paris's heart
there was a crow I spoke to
on the cornice far above my window.
It is the crow from home
that cawed above the immense
gaunt bear eating sweet-pea vines
and wild strawberries.
Today in the garden of Luxembourg
I passed through clumps of frozen vines
and saw a man in a bulletproof
glass house guarding stone,
a girl in the pink suit
of an unknown animal,
lovers nursing at each other's mouths.
I know that at my deathbed's urging
there'll be no clocks and I'll cry out
for heat not light.
This lady is stuck
on an elevator
shuddering
between the planets.

If life has passed this quickly,
a millennium is not all that long.
At fourteen
my sex fantasies
about Lucrezia Borgia:
I loved her name, the image
of her rinascimento undies,
her feet in the stirrups
of a golden saddle.
She's gone now
these many years.

Dad told me that we have time
so that everything won't happen at once.
For instance, deaths are spread out.
It would be real hard on people
if all the deaths for the year
occurred the same day.

Lemuribus vertebrates,
ossibus inter-tenebras --
"For the vertebrate ghosts,
for the bones among the darknesses,"
quoted the great Bringhurst,
who could have conquered Manhattan
and returned it to the natives,
who might have continued dancing
on the rocky sward.

The stillness
of dog shadows.

Here is time:
In the crotch of limbs
the cow's skull grew
into the tree
and birds nested in the mouth
year after year.

Human blood still fertilizes
the crops of Yurp.
The humus owns names:
Fred and Ted from old Missouri,
Cedric and Basil from Cornwall,
Heinz and Hans from Stuttgart,
Fyodor and Gretel in final embrace
beside raped Sylvie,
clod to clod.

The actual speed of life
is so much slower
we could have lived
exactly seven times as long
as we did.

These calendars
with pussy photos
send us a mixed message:
Marilyn Monroe stretched out
in unwinged victory,
pink against red and reaching
not for the president or Nembutal
but because, like cats,
we like to do so.

Someday
like rockets without shells
we'll head for the stars.

On my newly devised calendar
there are only three days a month.
All the rest is space
so that night and day
don't feel uncomfortable
within my confines.
I'm not pushing them around,
making them do this and that.

Just this once
cows are shuffling over the hard rock
of the creek bed.
Two ravens in the black oak
purling whistles, coos, croaks,
raven-talk for the dead wild cow's
hindquarter in the grass,
the reddest of reds,
hips crushed when lassoed.
The cow dogs, blue heelers,
first in line for the meat,
all tugging like Africa.
Later, a stray sister
sniffs the femur bone,
bawls in boredom or lament.
In this sun's clock the bone
will become white, whiter, whitest.

The soul's decorum
dissembles
when she understands
that ashes have never
returned to wood.

Even running downstream
I couldn't step
into the same river once
let alone twice.

At first the sound
of the cat drinking water
was unendurable,
then it was broken by a fly
heading north,
a curve-billed thrasher
swallowing a red berry,
a dead sycamore leaf
suspended on its way to earth
by a breeze so slight
it went otherwise unnoticed.

The girl in the many-windowed bedroom
with full light coming in from the south
and the sun broken by trees,
has never died.

My friend's great-grandfather
lived from 1798 until 1901.

When a place is finished
you realize it went
like a truly beloved dog
whose vibrance had made
you think it would last forever;
becoming slightly sick,
then well and new again
though older, then sick
again, a long sickness.
A home burial.

They don't appear to have
firmed up their idea when time
started so we can go it alone.
"From birth to old age
it's just you," said Foyan.
So after T'ang foolery and Tancred
(the Black Pope of Umbanda)
I've lived my life in sevens,
not imagining that God could holler,
"Bring me my millennium!"
The sevens are married to each other
by what dogs I owned at the time,
where I fished and hunted,
appealing storms, solstice dinners,
loves and deaths, all the events
that are the marrow of the gods.

O lachrymae sonorense.
From the ground
paced the stars through the ribs
of ocotillo, thin and black
each o'clock till dawn,
rosy but no fingers except
these black thin stalks
directing a billion bright stars,
captured time swelling outward
for us if we are blessed
to be here on the ground,
night sky shot with measured stars,
night sky without end
amen.





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