Saving Daylight, Page 4

  que la mar es madre no padre. No podemos estar solos.

  ¿Dónde estaba el perro para acariciar la mano con la que escribía?

  Perro, te doy mi segunda empanada,

  la sonrisa roja de mi corazón, el crepúsculo que lleva la mar

  a mi cuarto donde Giselle duerme bien desnuda

  sobre su vientre para que yo aúlle sin voz

  al Caribe, porque no soy un perro de buena fe,

  soy un perro poético a quien la luna devuelve con un aullido

  su mensaje espantoso de llegada y despedida.

  Madre, Virgen, amante sobre su vientre. Las tres son una,

  pero estamos en partes, pies y cabeza de alguna manera

  arrastrándose hacia nuestros cuerpos, moviéndose como yo ahora

  bajo el ventilador, meciéndonos perpetuamente. Madre, Virgen,

  perdónennos nuestras amantes. Una vez ustedes fueron mujeres.

  ~ probablemente escrito por Pablo Neruda

  In Veracruz in 1941

  Giselle gave me a primitive statuette

  of the Virgin from Sonora, stars spoked from her head,

  chipped lips and eyebrows, flaked nose,

  and from underneath her skirt the infant

  Jesus peeks out saluting with two raised

  hands, announcing his arrival among us.

  Giselle, no man can sleep with all three:

  mother, lover, Virgin.

  I confess that your nipples are ruby

  but at death they will become turquoise.

  With your bare foot in my lap I also confess

  I’ll leave your unbearable statuette behind,

  or en route to Havana drop it in the ocean,

  to rest in the lap of America’s poet, Hart Crane,

  who could not learn the language of chilies and flowers,

  that the sea is mother not father. We can’t be alone.

  Where was the dog to caress his writing hand?

  Dog, I give you my second empanada,

  my heart’s red smile, the twilight that carries the sea

  into my room where Giselle sleeps quite naked

  on her belly so that I give a voiceless howl

  to the Caribbean, not being a bona fide dog

  but a poetic dog at whom the moon howls back

  her terrifying message of arriving and leave-taking.

  Mother, Virgin, lover on her belly. The three are one,

  but we are in parts, feet and head somehow

  crawling toward our bodies, moving as I do now

  under the fan endlessly rocking, Mother, Virgin,

  forgive us our lovers. You were women once.

  ~ very likely by Pablo Neruda (translated by Jim Harrison)

  Dream Love

  How exhausted we can become

  from the contents of dreams:

  long, too long nights of love

  with whirling corrupted faces,

  unwilling visits from the dead

  whom we never quite summoned;

  the animals who chased our souls

  at noon when we were children

  so that we wished to be magical dogs

  running backwards off the world’s

  edge into a far better place

  than a hot noon with earth herself

  a lump in our weary young throats.

  In dream love we’re playing

  music to an empty room.

  On leaving the room the music

  continues and surrounds those we loved

  and lost who are at roost

  in their forested cemeteries,

  visible but forever beyond our reach.

  They won’t fly away until we join them.

  Flower, 2001

  Near a flowershop off boulevard Raspail

  a woman in a sundress bending over,

  I’d guess about 49 years of age

  in a particular bloom, just entering

  the early autumn of her life,

  a thousand-year-old smile on her face

  so wide open that I actually shuddered

  the same shudder I did in 1989

  coming over the lip of a sand dune

  and seeing a big bear below me.

  Patagonia Poem

  Here in the first morning sunlight I’m trying

  to locate myself not by latitude 31.535646° N,

  or longitude 110.747511° W, but by the skin

  of my left hand at the edge of the breakfast plate.

  This hand has the skin and fingers of an animal.

  The right hand forks the egg of a bird, a chicken.

  The bright yellow yolk was formerly alive

  in the guts of the bird waiting for the absent rooster.

  Since childhood it has been a struggle

  not to run away and hide in a thicket and sometimes

  I did so. Now I write “Jim” with egg yolk

  on the white plate in order to remember my name,

  and suddenly both hands look like

  an animal’s who also hides in a remote thicket.

  I feel my head and the skull ever so slightly

  beneath the skin, a primate’s skull that tells

  me a thicket is a good idea for my limited

  intelligence, and this hand holding a pen, a truly

  foreign object I love, could with its brother hand

  build a shelter in which to rest awhile and take

  delight in life again, to wander in the moonlight

  when earth achieves its proper shape, to rest looking

  out through a tangle of branches at a daylight

  world that can’t see back in at this animal shape.

  Reading Calasso

  I’m the pet dog of a family of gods

  who never gave me any training.

  Usually they are remote.

  I curl up in an empty house

  and they peek in the window when I’m sleeping.

  Their children feed me table scraps

  from ink-stained fingers.

  Sometimes they lock me in a shed

  and keep calling my name outside the door.

  They expect me to bark day and night

  because nearly everyone is their enemy.

  The Bear

  When my propane ran out

  when I was gone and the food

  thawed in the freezer I grieved

  over the five pounds of melted squid,

  but then a big gaunt bear arrived

  and feasted on the garbage, a few tentacles

  left in the grass, purplish white worms.

  O bear, now that you’ve tasted the ocean

  I hope your dreamlife contains the whales

  I’ve seen, that one in the Humboldt current

  basking on the surface who seemed to watch

  the seabirds wheeling around her head.

  Bars

  Too much money-talk sucks the juice

  out of my heart. Despite a fat wallet

  I always become a welfare mother trying to raise

  the price of a chicken for my seven children,

  the future characters of my novels

  who are inside me wanting to go to a bar.

  They’re choking on unwritten book dust and need

  a few drinks as much as I do. (We’re all

  waiting to see what we become when we’re grown up.)

  Everyone smart knows that alcohol is life’s

  consolation prize for the permanently inconsolable.

  Even my unborn characters who right now

  are simpleminded demons sense the drinks

  waiting for them when their bodies reach solid ground.

  At four PM I resist for moments, head for the Bluebird

  where in the parking lot I become a prescient animal,

  probably a stray dog, hearing the ass-cheek squeak

  of a woman passing on the sidewalk. A small male

  fly follows her swinging left ankle and s
miles

  looking upward in the season of summer dresses.

  One drink and I’m petulant. Men in golf clothes

  are talking about the stock market where once

  men talked of farming, hunting, fishing, the weather.

  If Holly weren’t sitting jauntily on a bar stool

  I’d gulp and bolt. Something about a bar stool

  that loves a woman’s bottom. Vodka makes me young

  but not young enough and the men keep saying Lucent

  Lucent Lucent. Secret powers only allow

  me two drinks before dinner so I head for Dick’s Tavern

  where actual working men talk of fishing,

  crops, bankrupt orchards, the fact that the moon

  is a bit smaller than it used to be. No one says Lucent,

  only that the walleyes are biting short, but Lucent,

  this preposterous French word afflicting so many

  with melancholy, carries me back to Paris

  where dozens of times I’ve entered the Select

  on Montparnasse with hungry heart and mind.

  When I’m there next month I’ll order my bottle

  of Brouilly, perhaps a herring salad, say “Lucent”

  loudly to a woman to see what happens. Wine

  makes me younger than vodka and while I drink

  I’ll pet the cat who after a dozen years will finally

  sit on my lap, and think we’re better at nearly

  everything than the French except how to live life,

  a small item indeed. Once I left the Select

  for the airport, de Gaulle, and twenty-four hours

  later I was sitting in my cabin in the Upper Peninsula

  waiting for a sow bear and two cubs to leave

  the clearing so I could go to the bar, The Dunes Saloon,

  and think over France in tranquility. The idea

  of going to this bar draws in creature life. Once in the driveway

  a female wolf stood in my headlights and nodded,

  obviously the reincarnation of a girl I knew

  who drowned in Key West where I first discovered

  that one drink can break the gray egg that sometimes

  encloses you, two drinks help you see this world.

  Three drinks and you’re back inside the gray egg.

  Diabetes

  I’m drawing blood the night of the full moon,

  also a full eclipse of the full moon.

  When will this happen again in my life,

  if ever? Maybe in yours, of course.

  I’m drawing blood not in Vampirism

  but in diabetes. Few can find the Carpathians

  on the map. It would be unhealthy for a vampire

  to drink my sugary blood, which is a river

  miles in length, a rare round river,

  billions of round rivers walking the earth

  and flowing with blood. A needle pops

  the finger and out it comes, always a surprise,

  red as a rose rose red my heart pumps flower red.

  You wonder who created this juice of life?

  And what power in the blood, as the hymn goes.

  The grizzly flips the huge dead buffalo like a pancake.

  The bloody brain concocts its mysteries, Kennedy’s

  fragments flying forever through the air in our neurons.

  Walking outside with a bloody smear on my tingling

  finger I stare at the half-shadowed bloodless

  moon. Fifty yards away in September wolves killed

  three of Bob Webber’s sheep. My wife Linda called

  me in Paris to say that from our bedroom window

  before dawn you could hear them eating the sheep.

  Red blood on the beige grass of late September.

  Searchers

  At dawn Warren is on my bed,

  a ragged lump of fur listening

  to the birds as if deciding whether or not

  to catch one. He has an old man’s

  mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across

  the yard and he walks after it

  thinking he might close the widening distance

  just as when I followed a lovely woman

  on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn’t equal

  her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes

  moving into the distance, turning the final

  corner, but when I turned the corner

  she had disappeared and I looked up

  into the trees thinking she might have climbed one.

  When I was young a country girl would climb

  a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face.

  Warren and I are both searchers. He’s looking

  for his dead sister Shirley, and I’m wondering

  about my brother John who left the earth

  on this voyage all living creatures take.

  Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant

  insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars.

  Mother Night

  When you wake at three AM you don’t think

  of your age or sex and rarely your name

  or the plot of your life which has never

  broken itself down into logical pieces.

  At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension

  wherein the galaxies make more sense

  than your job or the government. Jesus at the well

  with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid

  than your car. You can clearly see the bear

  climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children’s

  story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse

  named June still stomps the ground for an apple.

  What is morning and what if it doesn’t arrive?

  One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked

  me if God was the same species as we are?

  Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber’s

  sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,

  burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.

  She said, “Only lunatics save newspapers

  and magazines,” fried me two eggs, then said,

  “If you want to understand mortality look at birds.”

  Blue moon, two full moons this month,

  which I conclude are two full moons. In what

  direction do the dead fly off the earth?

  Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

  The Creek

  One. Two. Three.

  Before six AM waking

  to the improbable ache of confused

  dreams so that the open world

  of consciousness was to jump into hell.

  Fled the house with my dog Rose,

  crossed the creek and into a thicket

  after counting three different beer cans

  by the road, two varieties of water bottles.

  Who hears?

  asked the man with ears.

  Eleven different birdcalls

  and a vermilion flycatcher just beyond

  my nose fluttering along a willow

  branch unsure of my company

  during his bug breakfast.

  Who hears? Far above a soundless gray hawk

  attacks and chases away two turkey vultures.

  Looked up again and sensed the dead

  lounging upon those billowing cumulus clouds.

  I’ll check on this the next time I fly.

  Birds Again

  A secret came a week ago though I already

  knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.

  The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds

  are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.

  I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-

  weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation

  and now they’re roosting within me, recalling

  how I had watched them at night


  in fall and spring passing across earth moons,

  little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing

  on their way north or south. Now in my dreams

  I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,

  the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying

  me rather than me carrying them. Next winter

  I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado

  and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching

  on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye

  and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

  Becoming

  Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.

  None of us is the same person as yesterday.

  We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.

  This downward cellular jubilance is shared

  by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,

  and perhaps the black holes in galactic space

  where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible

  thimble of antimatter. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin

  grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle

  a wife beater in New York City in 1957.

  We whirl with the earth, catching our breath

  as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained

  except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.

  Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

  Portal, Arizona

  I’ve been apart too long

  from this life we have.

  They deep-fry pork chops locally.

  I’ve never had them that way.

  In the canyon at dawn the Cooper’s hawk

  rose from her nest. Lion’s pug marks

  a few miles up where the canyon narrowed

  and one rock had an eye with sky beyond.

  A geezer told me Nabokov wrote here

  while his beloved Vera tortured the piano.

  He chased butterflies to their pinheaded doom

  but Lolita survived. What beauty