LETTERS TO YESENIN: 8 by JAMES HARRISON

I cleaned the granary dust off your photo with my shirtsleeve. Now that we are
tidy we can wait for the host to descend presumably from the sky as that seems
to exhaust the alternatives. You had a nice summer in the granary. I was out
there with you every day in June and July writing one of my six-week wonders,
another novel. Loud country music on the phonograph, wasps and bees and birds
and mice. The horses looked in the window every hour or so, curious and rather
stupid. Chief Joseph stared down from the wall at both of us, a far nobler man
than we ever thought possible. We can't lead ourselves and he led a thousand
with a thousand horses a thousand miles. He was a god and had three wives when
one is usually more than enough for a human. These past weeks I have been
organizing myself into my separate pieces. I have the limberness of a man twice
my age and this is as good a time as any to turn around. Joseph was very
understanding, incidentally, when the Cavalry shot so many of the women and
children. It was to be expected. Earth is full of precedents. They hang
around like underground trees waiting for their chance. The fish swam around
four years solid in preparation for August the seventh, 1972, when I took his
life and ate his body. Just as we may see our own ghosts next to us whose
shapes we will someday flesh out. All of this suffering to become a ghost.
Yours held a rope, manila, straight from the tropics. But we don't reduce such
glories to a mudbath. The ghost giggles at genuflections. You can't buy him a
drink. Out in a clearing in the woods the other day I got up on a stump and did
a little dance for mine. We know the most frightening time is noon. The
evidence says I'm halfway there, such wealth I can't give away, thirty-four
years of seconds.

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