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?
; 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