Harrison - In search of small gods
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- Book:In search of small gods
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- Publisher:Copper Canyon Press
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- Year:2009
- City:Port Townsend, Wash
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Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetitesfor food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate.Salon.com
In Jim Harrisons new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imaginedfrom remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II EuropeHarrison calls his readers to live fully in a world where Death steals everything except our stories. In Search of Small Gods is an urgent and imaginative bookone filled with the spore of the gods.
Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they werent harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . .
Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Legends of the Fall and Shape of the Journey. A long-time resident of Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.
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This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.
to Ted and Dan
Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada ms;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrs
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
Antonio Machado, Proverbs and Songs #29, translated by Willis Barnstone
I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake
in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,
the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,
used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,
abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,
gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls
who havent quite gone totally wild, river eddies,
leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,
turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages lost in the woods,
the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands
of birds Ive talked to all of my life, the dogs
that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow
me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,
the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see
from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling
to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.
Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio
another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie.
Theyre a kind of cosmic business machine like
their cousin clocks but break down at inopportune times.
Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar
but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons
of greed and my imperishable stupidity.
Of late Ive escaped those fatal squares
with their razor-sharp numbers for longer and longer.
I had to become the moving water I already am,
falling back into the human shape in order
not to frighten my children, grandchildren, dogs and friends.
Our old cat doesnt care. He laps the water where my face used to be.
Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldnt read or write. She wasnt a virgin.
She was simpleminded, we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
Shes lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.
Why does the new moon give anyone hope?
Nevertheless it does and always has for me
and likely does for that Mexican poet with no pesos,
maybe a couple of tortillas, chewing them while sitting
on a smooth rock beside a creek in the Sierra Madres
seeing the new moon tilted delicately away from Venus,
the faint silver light, the ever-so-small sliver
of white enamel rippling in the creek, the same moon,
he thinks, that soothed the Virgin in her great doubt
over the swollen belly beneath her breasts.
The fatherless son had two new moons in his forty days
in the wilderness, the second one telling him it was time
to become God and enter the beast of history.
This poet, though, ignores the sacraments of destiny
and only wants a poem to sing the liquid gift of night.
Im hoping to be astonished tomorrow
by I dont know what:
not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold
snowy willows, garishly green and yellow,
and not my usual death, which Ive done
before with Borodins music
used in Kismet, and angels singing
Stranger in Paradise, that sort of thing,
and not the thousand naked women
running a marathon in circles around me
while I swivel on a writerly chair
keeping an eye on my favorites.
What could it be, this astonishment,
but falling into a liquid mirror
to finally understand that the purpose
of earth is earth? Its plain as night.
Shes willing to sleep with us a little while.
The other boot doesnt drop from heaven.
Ive made this path and nobody else
leading crookedly up through the pasture
where Ill never reach the top of Antelope Butte.
It is here where my mind begins to learn
my hearts language on this endless
wobbly path, veering south and north
informed by my all-too-vivid dreams
which are a compass without a needle.
Today the gods speak in drunk talk
pulling at a heart too old for this walk,
a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth
of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.
Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names
of a dozen friends who have died in recent years,
names now incomprehensible as the mountains
across the river far behind me.
Ill always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.
Perhaps when we die our names are taken
from us by a divine magnet and are free
to flutter here and there within the bodies
of birds. Ill be a simple crow
who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.
I keep waiting without knowing
what Im waiting for.
I saw the setting moon at dawn
roll over the mountain
and perhaps into the dragons mouth
until tomorrow evening.
There is this circle I walk
that I have learned to love.
I hope one day to be a spiral
but to the birds Im a circle.
A thousand Spaniards died looking
for gold in a swamp when it was
in the mountains in clear sight beyond.
Here, though, on local earth my heart
is at rest as a groundling, letting
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