Songs of Unreason Read online

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  for Will Hearst

  Life never answers.

  It has no ears and doesn’t hear us;

  it doesn’t speak, it has no tongue.

  It neither goes nor stays:

  we are the ones who speak,

  the ones who go,

  while we hear from echo to echo, year to year,

  our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.

  That which we call life

  hears itself within us, speaks with our tongues,

  and through us, knows itself.

  Octavio Paz, from “Response and Reconciliation,” translated

  by Eliot Weinberger

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Broom

  Notation

  American Sermon

  Arts

  Bird’s-Eye View

  Poet Warning

  A Part of My History

  The Muse in Our Time

  Muse II

  Poet at Nineteen in NYC

  Sister

  Skull

  Horses

  René Char II

  Xmas Cheeseburgers

  Mary the Drug Addict

  Night Creatures

  Deaf Dog’s Bark

  June the Horse

  Poet No. 7

  A Puzzle

  Rumination

  Dan’s Bugs

  Invisible

  Mary

  Remote Friends

  Poet Science

  Ache

  Oriole

  Blue Shawl

  River I

  River II

  River III

  River IV

  River V

  River VI

  River VII

  Spring

  Sky

  March in Patagonia, AZ

  Brazil

  Grand Marais

  Desert Snow

  Reality

  She

  Love

  Back into Memory

  Debtors

  Prisoners

  Corruption

  Our Anniversary

  Doors

  Greed

  Cereal

  D.B.

  Sunlight

  Brutish

  Nightfears

  Blue

  The Current Poor

  Moping

  Church

  Chatter

  Return

  Prado

  Death Again

  Suite of Unreason

  About the Author

  Books by Jim Harrison

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  BROOM

  To remember you’re alive

  visit the cemetery of your father

  at noon after you’ve made love

  and are still wrapped in a mammalian

  odor that you are forced to cherish.

  Under each stone is someone’s inevitable

  surprise, the unexpected death

  of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.

  Now to home without looking back,

  enough is enough.

  En route buy the best wine

  you can aff ord and a dozen stiff brooms.

  Have a few swallows then throw the furniture

  out the window and begin sweeping.

  Sweep until the walls are

  bare of paint and at your feet sweep

  until the floor disappears. Finish the wine

  in this field of air, return to the cemetery

  in evening and wind through the stones

  a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.

  NOTATION

  They say the years are layers, laminae.

  They lie. Our minds aren’t stuck together

  like trees. We’re much nearer to a ball of snakes

  in winter, a flock of blackbirds, a school of fish.

  Your brain guides you away from sentences.

  It is consoled by the odor of the chokecherry tree

  that drifts its sweetness through the studio window.

  Chokecherry trees have always been there

  along with crab apples. The brain doesn’t care

  about layers. It is both vertical and horizontal

  in a split second, in all directions at once.

  Nearly everything we are taught is false

  except how to read. All these poems that drift

  upward in our free-floating minds hang there

  like stationary birds with a few astonishing

  girls and women. Einstein lights a cigarette

  and travels beyond the galaxies that have

  no layers. Our neurons are designed after 90 billion galaxies.

  As a shattered teenager I struggled to paint

  a copy of El Greco’s View of Toledo to Berlioz’s Requiem.

  The canvas was too short but very deep. I walked

  on my knees to see what the world looked like

  to Toulouse-Lautrec. It didn’t work. I became seven

  again. It was World War II. I was about

  to lose an eye. The future was still in the sky

  above me, which I had to learn to capture

  in the years that never learned as clouds

  to be layered. First warm day. Chokecherry burst. Its song.

  AMERICAN SERMON

  I am uniquely privileged to be alive

  or so they say. I have asked others

  who are unsure, especially the man with three

  kids who’s being foreclosed next month.

  One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,

  they can pry her out with tractor

  and chain. Mother needs heart surgery

  but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking

  with pork fat. My friend Sam has made

  five hundred bucks in 40 years

  of writing poetry. He has applied for 120

  grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps

  strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.

  Back to the girl on the farm. She’s been

  keeping records of all the wildflowers

  on the never-tilled land down the road,

  a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed

  since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries

  with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being

  taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down

  to Lansing where Dad has a job in a

  bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.

  ARTS

&
nbsp; It’s better to start walking before you’re born.

  As with dancing you have to learn the steps

  and after that free-form can be the best.

  Stevens said technique is the proof of seriousness,

  though the grace of a Maserati is limited to itself.

  There is a human wildness held beneath the skin

  that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.

  I can’t walk in the shoes cobbled for me.

  They weren’t devised by poets but by shoemakers.

  BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

  In the Sandhills of Nebraska

  the towns are mere islands, sandspits,

  in the ocean of land while in the Upper Peninsula

  of Michigan, the towns seem not very successful

  attempts to hold back the forest. In Montana

  the mountains are so dominant that some days

  the people refuse to look at them as children

  turn away from the fathers who beat them.

  But of course in most places the people

  have won, the cities and highways have won.

  As in nearly all wars both sides have lost

  and the damage follows until the end of our time.

  It seems strange that it could have been done well.

  Greed has always fouled our vast nest.

  Tiring of language, the mind takes flight

  swimming off into the ocean of air thinking

  who am I that the gods and men have disappointed me?

  You walk through doorways in the mind you can’t walk out

  then one day you discover that you’ve learned to fly.

  From up here the water is still blue, the grass green

  and the wind that buoys me is 12 billion years old.

  POET WARNING

  He went to sea

  in a thimble of poetry

  without sail or oars

  or anchor. What chance

  do I have, he thought?

  Hundreds of thousands

  of moons have drowned out here

  and there are no gravestones.

  A PART OF MY HISTORY

  I took the train from Seville to Granada with a vintner friend. I had been reading Federico García Lorca for over fifty years and needed to see where he was murdered on the mountainside near Granada. Beware old man! We visited the site of the murder, drank a little wine, and I began to drown in melancholy. We went to our hotel where I planned to stay in Lorca’s room but it frightened me and I moved to another. We toured the city in the morning and I stared at the Sierra Nevada glistening with snow that was somehow somber as the jewelry of the dead. I took a nap and wept for no reason. We went to a magnificent flamenco concert on a hill across from the Alhambra and ate very late in the evening. I became quite ill. My friend had to leave for her home in Collioure. I spent the day reading my empty journal, the white pages swarming with nothing. At 5 a.m. I went to an airport hours away in the darkness, flew to Madrid, then from Madrid to Chicago sitting next to a girl of surpassing beauty who said that she was an Erasmus scholar, an honor of sorts. I slept for eight hours and dreamt that Erasmus was a girl. At a Chicago airport hotel I thought I was slipping away and was taken to a hospital in an ambulance and my journal was crushed in my pocket. I stayed in ER for seven hours and a Chinese magician restored me. At dawn I flew to Montana and barely recognized our dog. My advice is, do not try to inhabit another’s soul. You have your own.

  THE MUSE IN OUR TIME

  We were born short boys in tall grass.

  We became the magicians who actually

  sawed the girl in half. We were prosecuted

  unfairly by the gods for this simple mistake

  and exiled to the tropics where we wore

  the masques of howler monkeys

  until we became howler monkeys

  in the fabulous zoo of our culture.

  Now as an amateur surgeon I’m putting

  the girl back together stitch by painful stitch

  beside the creek in the winter twilight.

  She begs me to stop. She wants to become

  a night-blooming cereus only seen

  every decade or so in the random dark.

  MUSE II

  Pretty girls most often have pretty

  parents but then for unknown genetic

  reasons a beautiful woman is born

  of homely parents. She is not happy

  about being set aside by the gods.

  At family gatherings truly ugly relatives

  want to murder her but this is rarely

  done in poetry since William Shakespeare.

  Out in the orchard she is buggered

  nearly to death by her cousins who all

  become scientists who devise products

  we never imagined we would need.

  She is sent into the world. She crawls

  into the low door of the city but yearns

  to stand straight. She floats up a river

  into the country and lives with wild dogs

  who are soon hunted to death for sport.

  She wants to step off the world but can’t find

  the edge. A man flies her to Mexico

  and makes her a prostitute. She escapes

  but a pimp slashes her face, a happy

  moment because now she’s not beautiful.

  She walks twenty miles down an empty beach

  and lives with an old, deaf fisherman.

  Now her soul swells with the grandeur of the ocean,

  the beauty of fish, the silence of man,

  the moon and stars she finally understands.

  POET AT NINETEEN IN NYC

  The poet looking for an immortal poem

  from his usual pathetic position as a graduate

  student in a university that doesn’t exist.

  He knows three constellations, this expert

  of the stars, and sometimes notices the moon

  by the time it reaches its first quarter.

  He’s admirable and keeps his chin high

  in the city’s arctic winds. He drinks

  a hundred drinks a month, three a day

  and a bit more for courage. He has a room

  and a half, the half a tiny kitchenette,

  and his table for writing and eating

  is a piece of plywood he places on the bed.

  Tacked above the bed are pictures of his heroes,

  Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Lorca and Faulkner,

  and of course Rimbaud. He doesn’t fear rejection

  because he keeps his work to himself. He thinks

  he’s as inevitable as a river but doesn’t have time

  to keep time. The hardest part is when the river

  is too swift and goes underground for days on end.

  SISTER

  I wanted to play a song for you

  on our old $28 phonograph

  from 1954 but the needle is missing

  and they no longer make the needles.

  It is the work of man to make a voice

  a needle. You were buried at nineteen

  in wood with Daddy. I’ve spent a lifetime

  trying to learn the language of the dead.

  The musical chatter of the tiny yellow finches

  in the front yard comes closest. It’s midnight

  and I’m giving my nightly rub to the dog’s

  tummy, something she truly depends on.

  Maybe you drifted upward as an ancient

  bird hoping to nest on the moon.

  SKULL

  You can’t write the clear biography

  of the aches and pains inside your skull.

  Will I outlive my passport expiration?

  Will the knots of the past beat me to death

  like limber clubs, the Gordian knots

  that never will be untied, big as bowling balls?

  Maybe not. Each time I row the river

  for six hours or so the innards
of my skull

  slightly change shape. Left alone knots

  can unravel in the turbulence of water.

  It isn’t for me to understand why loved ones

  died. My skull can’t withstand

  the Tao of the mighty river carrying me along

  as if I were still and the mountains

  capped by clouds were rushing past.

  After we submerge do we rise again in another form?

  Meanwhile I speculate on the seven pills

  I must take each day to stay alive.

  I ask each one, “Are we doing your job?”

  The only answer I’ve found is the moving

  water whose music is without a single lyric.

  HORSES

  In truth I am puzzled most in life

  by nine horses.

  I’ve been watching them for eleven weeks

  in a pasture near Melrose.

  Two are on one side of the fence and seven

  on the other side.

  They stare at one another from the same places

  hours and hours each day.

  This is another unanswerable question

  to haunt us with the ordinary.

  They have to be talking to one another

  in a language without a voice.

  Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers,

  sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

  Linguists say that language comes after music

  and we sang nonsense syllables

  before we invented a rational speech

  to order our days.

  We live far out in the country where I hear

  creature voices night and day.

  Like us they are talking about their lives

  on this brief visit to earth.