(Not so) random selections from Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth,
(a section of a larger collection-1982) which, when I read them
this morning occasionally glancing out the window at a new day’s
emerging shadows, were shaded beautifully but sadly by Now.
.
Returning to Earth
She
pulls the sheet of the dance
across me
then runs, staking
the corners far out at sea
***
So curious in the middle America, the only “locus”
I know, to live and love at great distance. (Growing
up, everyone is willing to drive seventy miles to see
a really big grain elevator, ninety miles for a dance,
two hundred to look over a pair of Belgian mares
returning the next day for the purchase, three hundred
miles to see Hal Newhouser pitch in Detroit, eight
hundred miles to take the mongoloid kid to a Georgia faith healer.)
I hitched two thousand for my first glimpse of the Pacific.
When she first saw the Atlantic she said near Key Largo
“I thought it would be bigger.”
***
I widowed my small
collection of magic
until it poisoned itself with longing.
I have learned nothing.
I give orders to the rain.
I tried to catch the tempest in a gill net.
The stars seem a little closer lately.
I’m no longer afraid to die
but is this a guidepost of lunacy?
I intend to see the 10 hundred million worlds Manjusri
passed through before he failed to awaken the maiden.
Taking off and landing are the dangerous times.
I was commanded in a dream to dance.
***
O Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
talks to himself, talks to himself,
Faustus talks to himself,
talks to himself.
***
O I’m lucky
got a car that starts almost every day
tho’ I want a new yellow Chevy pickup
got two letters today
and I’d rather have three
have a lovely wife
but want all the pretty ones
got three white hawks in the barn
but want a Himalayan eagle
have s planet in the basement
but would prefer the moon in the granary
have the northern lights
but want the southern cross
***
The stillness of this earth
which we pass through
with the precise speed of our dreams
.
Jim Harrison
from, Selected & New Poems
Delacorte Press, 1982
.