Jim Harrison - Letters to Yesenin
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In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hardscrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies. In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.
Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenins inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: Im beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends.
In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: My year-old daughters red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.
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We hope you enjoy these poems. 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.In memory of J.D. Reed
Regard his flat magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing between shoes and the floor a light-year away. So this is a song of Yesenins noose that came to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home where theres nothing but snow. But I stood under your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg! a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart it wanted to implode.
And I walked down to the Neva embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart other than the poems you hurled into nothing those years before the articulate noose.
They rolled like moons of light into a puddle and were drowned. Not even the puddle can be located now. Yet I am encouraged by the way you hanged yourself, telling me that such things dont matter. You, the fabulous poet of Mother Russia. But still, even now, schoolgirls hold your dead heart, your poems, in their laps on hot August afternoons by the river while they wait for their boyfriends to get out of work or their lovers to return from the army, their dead pets to return to life again. To be called to supper.
You have a new life on their laps and can scent their lavender scent, the cloud of hair that falls over you, feel their feet trailing in the river, or hidden in a purse walk the Neva again. Best of all you are used badly like a bouquet of flowers to make them shed their dresses in apartments. See those steam pipes running along the ceiling. The rope.
I want to present all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted so I picked up Doctor Zhivago again but the TV was on with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in the early history of Australia. But then the movie was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is all ballet.
And what a dance you had kicking your legs from the ropeWe all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted again and read the poems at the end of Doctor Zhivago and just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughters red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.
It was no fun sitting around being famous, was it? Ill never have to learn that lesson. You find a page torn out of a book and read it feeling that here you might find the mystery of print in such phrases as summer was on the way or Gertrude regarded him somewhat quizzically. Your Sagane was a fraud. Love poems to girls you never met living in a country you never visited. Ive been everywhere to no particular purpose. And am well past love but not love poems.
I wanted to fall in love on the coast of Ecuador but the girls were itsy-bitsy and showers are not prominent in that area. Unlike Killarney where I also didnt fall in love the girls had good teeth. As in the movies the Latin girls proved to be spitfires with an endemic shanker problem. I didnt fall in love in Palm Beach or Paris. Or London. Or Leningrad.
I wanted to fall in love at the ballet but my seat was too far back to see faces clearly. At Sadko a pretty girl was sitting with a general and did not exchange my glance. In Normandy I fell in love but had colitis and couldnt concentrate. She had a way of not paying any attention to me that could not be misunderstood. That is a years love story. Except Key West where absolutely nothing happened with romantic overtones.
Now you might understand why I drink and grow fat. When I reach three hundred pounds there will be no more love problems, only fat problems. Then I will write reams of love poems. And if she pats my back a cubic yard of fat will jiggle. Last night I drank a hundred-proof quart and looked at a photo of my sister. Ten years dead.
Show me a single wound on earth that love has healed. I fed my dying dog a pound of beef and buried her happy in the barnyard.
The farmers and carpenters in the tavern with red, windburned faces. I am in there playing the pinball machine watching all those delicious lights flutter, the bells ring. I am halfway through a bottle of vodka and am happy to hear Manitoba howling outside. Home for dinner I ask my baby daughter if she loves me but she is too young to talk. She cares most about eating as I care most about drinking. Our wants are simple as they say.
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