Songs of Unreason
By Jim Harrison
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About this ebook
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison is a poet, novelist and essayist. His trilogy, The Legend of the Falls, has been adapted for film.
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Reviews for Songs of Unreason
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Jim is getting old and seems to be physically falling apart and these conditions are the subject of this collection of poems. Not his best but I really love this guy. Arizona is now the basis for his writing but I miss his northern writing I will miss him.
Book preview
Songs of Unreason - Jim Harrison
BROOM
To remember you’re alive
visit the cemetery of your father
at noon after you’ve made love
and are still wrapped in a mammalian
odor that you are forced to cherish.
Under each stone is someone’s inevitable
surprise, the unexpected death
of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.
Now to home without looking back,
enough is enough.
En route buy the best wine
you can aff ord and a dozen stiff brooms.
Have a few swallows then throw the furniture
out the window and begin sweeping.
Sweep until the walls are
bare of paint and at your feet sweep
until the floor disappears. Finish the wine
in this field of air, return to the cemetery
in evening and wind through the stones
a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.
NOTATION
They say the years are layers, laminae.
They lie. Our minds aren’t stuck together
like trees. We’re much nearer to a ball of snakes
in winter, a flock of blackbirds, a school of fish.
Your brain guides you away from sentences.
It is consoled by the odor of the chokecherry tree
that drifts its sweetness through the studio window.
Chokecherry trees have always been there
along with crab apples. The brain doesn’t care
about layers. It is both vertical and horizontal
in a split second, in all directions at once.
Nearly everything we are taught is false
except how to read. All these poems that drift
upward in our free-floating minds hang there
like stationary birds with a few astonishing
girls and women. Einstein lights a cigarette
and travels beyond the galaxies that have
no layers. Our neurons are designed after 90 billion galaxies.
As a shattered teenager I struggled to paint
a copy of El Greco’s View of Toledo to Berlioz’s Requiem.
The canvas was too short but very deep. I walked
on my knees to see what the world looked like
to Toulouse-Lautrec. It didn’t work. I became seven
again. It was World War II. I was about
to lose an eye. The future was still in the sky
above me, which I had to learn to capture
in the years that never learned as clouds
to be layered. First warm day. Chokecherry burst. Its song.
AMERICAN SERMON
I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the girl on the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.
ARTS
It’s better to start walking before you’re born.
As with dancing you have to learn the steps
and after that free-form can be the best.
Stevens said technique is the proof of seriousness,
though the grace of a Maserati is limited to itself.
There is a human wildness held beneath the skin
that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.
I can’t walk in the shoes cobbled for me.
They weren’t devised by poets but by shoemakers.
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
In the Sandhills of Nebraska
the towns are mere islands, sandspits,
in the ocean of land while in the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan, the towns seem not very successful