Читать книгу Braided Creek - Jim Harrison - Страница 6

How one old tire leans up against

another, the breath gone out of both.

Old friend,

perhaps we work too hard

at being remembered.

Which way will the creek

run when time ends?

Don’t ask me until

this wine bottle is empty.

While my bowl is still half full,

you can eat out of it too,

and when it is empty,

just bury it out in the flowers.

All those years

I had in my pocket.

I spent them,

nickel-and-dime.

Each clock tick falls

like a raindrop,

right through the floor

as if it were nothing.

In the morning light,

the doorknob, cold with dew.

The Pilot razor-point pen is my

compass, watch, and soul chaser.

Thousands of miles of black squiggles.

Under the storyteller’s hat

are many heads, all troubled.

At dawn, a rabbit stretches tall

to eat the red asparagus berries.

The big fat garter snake

emerged from the gas-stove burner

where she had coiled around the pilot light

for warmth on a cold night.

Straining on the toilet

we learn how

the lightning bug feels.

For sixty-three years I’ve ground myself

within this karmic mortar. Yesterday I washed

it out and put it high on the pantry shelf.

All I want to be

is a thousand blackbirds

bursting from a tree,

seeding the sky.

Republicans think that all over the world

darker-skinned people are having more fun

than they are. It’s largely true.

Faucet dripping into a pan,

dog lapping water,

the same sweet music.

The nuthatch is in business

on the tree trunk,

fortunes up and down.

Oh what dew

these mortals be.

Dawn to dark.

One long breath.

The wit of the corpse

is lost on the lid of the coffin.

A book on the arm of my chair

and the morning before me.

Everyone thought I’d die

in my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties.

This can’t go on forever.

There are mornings

when everything brims with promise,

even my empty cup.

Two squirrels fight

to near death,

red blood flecking green grass,

while chipmunks continue feeding.

What pleasure: a new straw hat

with a green brim to look through!

Rowing across the lake

all the dragonflies are screwing.

Stop it. It’s Sunday.

Throw out the anchor

unattached to a rope.

Heart lifts as it sinks.

Out of my mind at last.

On every topographic map,

the fingerprints of God.

When we were very poor one spring

I fished a snowy river and caught

a big trout. It changed our lives

that day: eating, drinking, singing, dancing.

Lost: Ambition.

Found: A good book,

an old sweater,

loose shoes.

Years ago

when I became tough as a nail

I became a nail.

An old song from my youth:

“I’m going to live, live, live

until I die.” Well, perhaps not.

Still at times I’m a dumb little boy

fishing from a rowboat in the rain

wanting to give the family a fish dinner.

Only today

I heard

the river

within the river.

Clear summer dawn,

first sun steams moisture

redly off the cabin roof,

a cold fire. Passing raven

eyeballs it with a quawk.

The rabbit is born

prepared for listening,

the poet just for talk.

As a boy when desperate I’d pray with bare knees

on the cold floor. I still do,

but from the window I look like an old man.

Two buzzards

perched on a hay bale

and a third just gliding in.

I want to describe my life in hushed tones

like a TV nature program. Dawn in the north.

His nose stalks the air for newborn coffee.

Turtle has just one plan

at a time, and every cell

buys into it.

The biomass of ants,

their total weight on earth,

exceeds our own.

They welcome us to their world

of small homes, hard work, big women.

But the seventeen-year cicada

has only one syllable.

What prizes and awards will I get for revealing

the location of the human soul? As Nixon said,

I know how to win the war but I’m not telling.

Some days

one needs to hide

from possibility.

She climbed the green-leafed apple tree

in her green Sunday dress. Her white panties

were white as the moon above brown legs.

Is this poem a pebble,

or a raindrop coated with dust?

Each time I go outside the world

is different. This has happened

all my life.

When I found my tracks in the snow

I followed, thinking that they might

lead me back to where I was. But

they turned the wrong way and went on.

I schlump around the farm

in dirty, insulated coveralls

checking the private lives of mice.

I heard the lake cheeping

under the ice, too weak

to break through the shell.

Nothing to do.

Nowhere to go.

The moth just drowned

in the whiskey glass.

This is heaven.

Wind in the chimney

turns on its heel

without crushing the ashes.

Way out in the local wilderness

the only human tracks are mine, left foot

pigeon-toed, aimless.

Trust snow to keep a secret.

Old white soup bowl

chipped like a tooth,

one of us is always empty.

I used to have time by the ass

but now I share it in common

and it’s going away.

These legs

are wearing out.

Uphill, downhill.

They’ll love

their flat earth rest.

Old centipede

can’t keep himself

from leaving.

My dog girlfriend Rose was lost

for three endless days and nights

during which I uncontrollably sobbed.

Fear is a swallow

in a boarded-up warehouse,

seeking a window out.

The brown stumps

of my old teeth

don’t send up shoots

in spring.

In New York

on a wet

and bitter street

I heard a crow from home.

Mouse nest in the toe of my boot,

have I been gone that long?

I haven’t forgotten