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After Jim Harrison’s
“Gathering April”
…but
still we praise
god for whom or which all blessings flow:
that April exists, that a body lays itself
down on a warm cellar door and remembers, drinks
in birds and wind, whiskey,…
the
little dooms hiding
in the shadow of each fence post.
Going out into the cold morning a little
hung over is like stuffing a crow
call in one ear and an unknown bird’s
in another. Ok, I
stole the crow and the unknown
and maybe the hangover but maybe you won’t
believe me about anything but the birds
or maybe you will. I’ll
say maybe
you’ll believe me when I say I need to
go out in the cold the way Harrison does
(he’s a badass dead guy I’m reading now)
and I don’t know how I ever got along
without him but I have and I will
when I close him up forever like ashes
and specifically the ashes of my friend
who is as close to Harrison as I will ever get
and he’s pretty fucking
close. I told a
living friend the other day about the pistol
my dead friend used
to take to work with him every day, covered
in the lunch box giving his meal an earned
for feeling though no I don’t want to say that
exactly just when I read about men going out loaded
with pistols and women who are not their wives
or daughters and pull the levers
together in succession or all at once that close them
away into their own world of booze and food
and screwing and I’m thinking I could have
been one of those women and loved
it if you know what I mean.
I can connect it
with going chairless into the den:
when the lion swishes his tail and quite leisurely
gets up to sniff and licks his whiskers
with his paw before opening
something (me? his
mouth?) wide enough
to close down slowly whole
on the offering like it was expected all along,
shaved clean, witness to bleak
and not so bleak things, pumping in
the esophagus like a rabbit in the body
of the snake, on its way down into
the viscous and colossal dark.
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