The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

  I love all my friends

  their skins are so warm,

  my dear mother dead father

  live sister dead sister

  two brothers

  their skins are so warm,

  I love my lovely wife

  her skin is most warm,

  and I love my dear self

  my skin is so warm,

  I come to great harm.

  I come to great harm.

  I want to be told a children’s story

  that will stick.

  I’m sorry I can’t settle for less.

  Some core of final delight.

  In the funeral parlor my limbs

  are so heavy I can’t rise.

  This isn’t me in this nest of silk

  but a relative bearing my face and name.

  I still wanted to become a cowboy

  or bring peace to the Middle East.

  This isn’t me. I saw Christ this summer

  rising over the Absaroka Range.

  Of course I was drunk.

  I carry my vices to the wilderness.

  That faintly blue person there among

  the nasturtiums, among crooning relatives

  and weeping wife, however, isn’t me.

  Where. We are born dead.

  Our minds can taste this source

  until that other death.

  A long rain and we are children

  and a long snow,

  sleeping children in deep snow.

  As in interims all journeys end

  in three steps

  with a mirrored door, beyond it a closet

  and a closet wall.

  And he wants to write poems to resurrect god,

  to raise all buried things the eye

  buries and the heart and brain, to

  move wild laughter in the throat of death.

  A new ax

  a new ax

  I’m going to play

  with my new ax

  sharp blue blade

  handle of ash.

  Then, exhausted, listen

  to my new record, Johnny Cash.

  Nine dollars in all,

  two lovely things to play with

  far better and more lasting

  than a nine-dollar whore

  or two bottles of whiskey.

  A new ax and Johnny Cash

  sharp blue blade and handle of ash

  O the stream of your blood

  runs as black as the coal.

  Saw ghosts not faintly or wispish,

  loud they were raising on burly arms

  at midday, witches’ Sunday in full light,

  murder in delight, all former dark things

  in noonlight, all light things love

  we perform at night and fuck as war wounds

  rub, and sigh as others sighed, blind

  in delight to the world outside the window.

  When I began to make false analogies

  between animals & humans, then countries,

  Russia is like America and America like Russia,

  the universe is the world and the world

  a university, the teacher is a crayfish,

  the poem is a bird and a housefly, a pig

  without a poke, a flame and an oilcan,

  a woman who never menstruates, a woman

  without glands who makes love by generalized

  friction; then I went to the country

  to think of precision, O the moon

  is the width of a woman’s thigh.

  The Mexican girl about fourteen years old

  in the 1923 National Geographic found in the attic

  when we thought the chimney was on fire and I stood

  on the roof with snow falling looking down into

  the black hole where the fire roared at the bottom.

  The girl: lying in the Rio Grande in a thin

  wet shift, water covering back between breasts

  and buttocks but then isolate the buttocks

  in the muddy water, two graceful melons from the deep

  in the Rio Grande, to ride them up to the river’s source

  or down to the sea, it wouldn’t matter, or I would

  carry her like a pack into some fastness like

  the Sawtooth Mountains. The melon butter of her

  in water, myself in the cloudy brown water

  as a fish beneath her.

  All falseness flows: you would rust

  in jerks, hobbles; they, dewlaps,

  sniff eglantine and in mint-cleared voices

  not from dark but in puddles over cement,

  an inch-deep of watery mud: all falseness

  flows; comes now, where should it rest?

  Merlin, as Merlin, le cri de Merlin,

  whose shores are never watched, as women

  have no more than one mouth staring

  at the ground; repeat now, from what cloud

  or clouds or country, countries in dim sleep,

  pure song, mouthless, as if a church buried

  beneath the sea – one bell tower standing

  and one bell; staring for whom at ground’s length,

  elbows in ground, stare at me now: she grows

  from the tree half-vine and half-woman

  and haunts all my nights, as music can

  that uses our tendons as chords, bowels to hurtle

  her gifts; myths as Arcturus, Aldebaran

  pictured as colored in with blood,

  her eyes were bees and in her hair ice

  seemed to glisten, drawn up as plants, the snake

  wrapped around the crucifix knows, glass knows,

  and O song, meal is made of us not even for small gods

  who wait in the morning; dark pushes with no

  to and fro, over and under, we who serve her

  as canticles for who falls deeper, breaks away,

  knows praise other than our own: sing.

  Merely land and heavily drawn away from the sea

  long before us, green has begun, every crevasse, kelp,

  bird dung, froth of sea, foam over granite, wet

  sea rose and roar of Baltic: who went from continent

  to island, as wolves or elk would at night,

  sea ice as salted glass, slight lid, mirror over

  dark; as Odin least of all gods, with pine smell

  of dark and animals crossed in winter

  with whales butting shores,

  dressed without heat in skins; said Christ who came

  late, nothing to be found here, lovers of wood

  not stone, north goes over and down, farthest from sun,

  aloud in distance white wolf, whiter bear

  with red mouth; they can eat flesh and nothing else.

  white winter

  white snow

  black trees

  green boughs

  over us

  Arctic sun, one wildflower in profusion,

  grass is blue, sterile fishless lake in rock

  and northern lights shimmering, crackling.

  As a child in mourning, mourned for, knows

  how short and bittersweet, not less for saying again,

  the child singing knows, near death, it is so alive,

  brief and sweet, earth scarcely known, small

  songs made of her, how large as hawk or tree,

  only a stone lives beyond sweet things:

  so that the sea raises herself not swallows

  but pushed by wind and moon destroys them;

  only dark gives light, Apollo, Christ,

  only a blue and knotted earth broken by green

  as high above gods see us in our sleeping end.

  We know no other, curled as we are here,

  sleep over earth, tongues, fog, thunder, wars.

  Christ raises. Islands from the sea, see people come.

  Clear your speech, it is all that we have,

  aloud and here and now.

  T
RADER

  I traded a girl

  two apples for an orange.

  I hate citrus

  but she was beautiful.

  As lovers we were rotten –

  this was before the sexual revolution –

  and we only necked and pawed,

  “Don’t write below the lines!”

  But now she’s traded

  that child’s red mitten

  I only touched

  for a stovepipe hat,

  four children,

  and a milkman husband.

  Soon I learn there will be no milkmen

  and she’ll want to trade again.

  Stop. I won’t take a giant Marianas

  trench for two red apples.

  You’ve had your orange

  now lie in it.

  HOSPITAL

  Someone is screaming almost in Morse

  code, three longs, a short, three

  longs again. Man, woman, or animal?

  Pale-blue room. How many have died

  here and will I with my ears drummed

  to pain with three longs, one short, three longs?

  It’s never a yelp, it starts

  far back in the throat

  with three longs, a short, three longs.

  All beasts everywhere listen to this.

  It must be music to the gods –

  three longs, one short, three longs.

  I don’t know who it is,

  a beautiful woman with a lion’s lungs

  screaming three longs, one short, three longs?

  COWGIRL

  The boots were on the couch and had

  manure on their heels and tips.

  The cowgirl with vermilion udders and ears

  that tasted of cream pulled on her jeans.

  The saddle is not sore and the crotch with

  its directionless brain is pounded by hammers.

  Less like flowers than grease fittings women

  win us to a life of holes, their negative space.

  I don’t know you and won’t. You look at my hairline

  while I work, conscious of history, in a bottomless lake.

  Thighs that are indecently strong and have won the West,

  I’ll go back home where women are pliant as marshmallows.

  DRINKING SONG

  I want to die in the saddle. An enemy of civilization

  I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink.

  I’m going to be a child about it and I can’t help it, I was

  born this way and it makes me very happy to fish and drink.

  I left when it was still dark and walked on the path to the

  river, the Yellow Dog, where I spent the day fishing and drinking.

  After she left me and I quit my job and wept for a year and

  all my poems were born dead, I decided I would only fish and drink.

  Water will never leave earth and whiskey is good for the brain.

  What else am I supposed to do in these last days but fish and drink?

  In the river was a trout, and I was on the bank, my heart in my

  chest, clouds above, she was in NY forever and I, fishing and drinking.

  AWAKE

  Limp with night fears: hellebore, wolfsbane,

  Marlowe is daggered, fire, volts, African vipers,

  the grizzly the horses sensed, the rattlesnake

  by the mailbox – how he struck at thrown rocks,

  black water, framed by police, wanton wife,

  I’m a bad poet broke and broken at thirty-two,

  a renter, shot by mistake, airplanes and trains,

  half-mast hard-ons, a poisoned earth, sun will

  go out, car break down in a blizzard,

  my animals die, fistfights, alcohol, caskets,

  the hammerhead gliding under the boat near

  Loggerhead Key, my soul, my heart, my brain,

  my life so interminably struck with an ax

  as wet wood splints bluntly, mauled into

  sections for burning.

  GHAZALS

  NOTES ON THE GHAZALS

  Poems are always better than a bloody turkey foot in the mailbox. Few would disagree. Robert Creeley once said, partly reconstituting Olson, “Form is never more than an extension of content.” True and sage. We choose what suits us and will not fairly wear what doesn’t fit. Don’t try to bury a horse in a human coffin, no matter how much you loved the horse, or stick some mute, lovely butterfly or luna moth in a damp cavern. I hate to use the word, but form must be an “organic” revelation of content or the poem, however otherwise lively, will strike us false or merely tricky, an exercise in wit, crochet, pale embroidery.

  The ghazal is an antique form dating from the thirteenth century and practiced by hundreds of poets since in languages as varied as Urdu, Arabic, Pashto, Turkish, Persian, German, French, and Spanish. Even Goethe and Schlegel wrote ghazals. Among my own contemporaries, Adrienne Rich has been especially successful with the form. I have not adhered to the strictness of metrics and structure of the ancient practitioners, with the exception of using a minimum of five couplets. The couplets are not related by reason or logic and their only continuity is made by a metaphorical jump. Ghazals are essentially lyrics and I have worked with whatever aspect of our life now that seemed to want to enter my field of vision. Crude, holy, natural, political, sexual. After several years spent with longer forms I’ve tried to regain some of the spontaneity of the dance, the song unencumbered by any philosophical apparatus, faithful only to its own music.

  –J.H.

  1971

  I

  Unbind my hair, she says. The night is white and warm,

  the snow on the mountains absorbing the moon.

  We have to get there before the music begins, scattered,

  elliptical, needing to be drawn together and sung.

  They have dark green voices and listening, there are birds,

  coal shovels, the glazed hysteria of the soon-to-be-dead.

  I suspect Jesus will return and the surprise will be

  fatal. I’ll ride the equator on a whale, a giraffe on land.

  Even stone when inscribed bears the ecstatic. Pressed to

  some new wall, ungiving, the screams become thinner.

  Let us have the tambourine and guitars and forests, fruit,

  and a new sun to guide us, a holy book, tracked in new blood.

  II

  I load my own shells and have a suitcase of pressed

  cardboard. Naturally I’m poor and picturesque.

  My father is dead and doesn’t care if his vault leaks,

  that his casket is cheap, his son a poet and a liar.

  All the honest farmers in my family’s past are watching

  me through the barn slats, from the corncrib and hogpen.

  Ghosts demand more than wives & teachers. I’ll make a

  “V” of my two books and plow a furrow in the garden.

  And I want to judge the poetry table at the County Fair.

  A new form, poems stacked in pyramids like prize potatoes.

  This county agent of poetry will tell poets, “More potash

  & nitrogen, the rows are crooked and the field limp, depleted.”

  III

  The alfalfa was sweet and damp in fields where shepherds

  lay once and rams strutted and Indians left signs of war.

  He harnesses the horses drawing the wagon of wheat toward

  the road, ground froze, an inch of sifting snow around their feet.

  She forks the hay into the mow, in winter is a hired girl

  in town and is always tired when she gets up for school.

  Asleep again between peach rows, drunk at midmorning and something

  conclusive is needed, a tooth pulled, a fistfight, a girl.

  Would any god come down from where and end a small war between

  two walls of bone, brain veering, bucking in fatal velocity?

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; IV

  Near a brown river with carp no doubt pressing their

  round pursed mouths to the river’s bed. Tails upward.

  Watching him behind his heifer, standing on a milk

  stool, flies buzzing and sister cows swishing tails.

  In the tree house the separate nickels placed in her hand.

  Skirt rises, her dog yelps below and can’t climb ladders.

  River and barn and tree. Field where wheat is scarcely high

  enough to hide, in light rain knees on pebbles and March mud.

  In the brain with Elinor and Sonia, Deirdre of course

  in dull flare of peat and Magdalen fresh from the troops.

  I want to be old, and old, young. With these few bodies at

  my side in a creel with fresh ferns & flowers over them.

  V

  Yes yes yes it was the year of the tall ships

  and the sea owned more and larger fish.

  Antiquarians know that London’s gutters were

  pissed into openly and daggers worn by whores.

  Smart’s Jeoffry had distant relatives roaming

  the docks hungry for garbage at dawn. Any garbage.

  O Keats in Grasmere, walking, walking. Tom

  is dead and this lover is loverless, loving.

  Wordsworth stoops, laughs only once a month and then

  in private, mourns a daughter on another shore.

  But Keats’s heart, Keats in Italy, Keats’s heart

  Keats how I love thee, I love thee John Keats.

  VI

  Now changed. None come to Carthage. No cauldrons, all love

  comes without oily sacraments. Skin breathes cooler air.

  And light was there and two cliff swallows hung and swooped