Obvious

movement obscures the form
the light on the water dazzles us
we can’t quite see

we peer and probe
seeking always seeking
as if there is some power
in depth

as if that surface glitter
is not enough

maybe movement is all there is –

the fine oscillation
of atoms, more space
than substance –

energy transmitted and transforming,
the slow drift
into entropy

flames dancing on the surface
of the universe

 “It is life’s work to recognize the mystery of the obvious”
Jim Harrison ~ Songs of Unreason

 

It finally arrived – the last day of Jilly’s 28 Days of Unreason project. It’s going to be strange without the daily wrestle with Jim Harrison’s gnomic sentences. Thank you, Jilly, for bringing this to us. 

It’s too hot to poet much tonight. We hit 31 degrees today – unheard of in this green and pleasant land! – so this is my offering for dVerse’s open link night as well.

Solstice pilgrim

This, then, is her solstice pilgrimage,
this six monthly walk, down this too long corridor,
ticking off letters, – M is for Women’s Health,
P is for Medical Photography
Q is for X-ray and Imaging.

She’s here in the long days of summer,
when the windows are open in this small room,
letting in voices and slow moving air,

and again in the short dark winter days
when there’s not enough light to spare,
not enough warmth to go around –

stripped of power, clothing, efficacy –
she has a name-tag in her bag, out there
she’s someone, here she repeats her name,
address, date of birth at each desk –

Open Sesame

– and she’s touched gently, probed by soft, kind hands,
that press and smooth her skin,
searching for the death that bubbles under it.

 

And there you go – Day 26 of Jilly’s 28 days of unreason challenge. I’m going to make a confession now: I haven’t read any Jim Harrison apart from the quotations put up here. I will, but I wanted to do this challenge without any preconceptions about his work, and just take each quotation on its own terms. It’s been a great series of prompts. I can’t believe we only have two to go. 

And here’s the quotation:

“There is a human wildness held beneath the skin that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable”   from Songs of Unreason

 

I’m also linking it up to tonight’s dVerse prompt – opposites attract, posted by Lillian. She asks us to write a poem including some opposites as contrasts. I’ve used the two solstices here.

Wildwood

The briar tangle of your gut,
clawed and tearing –
your lungs, full of bronchioles
that branch like an oak tree,
all those blood vessels, fine as roots,
neurones twisting and tangling –

The wild wood lives in you.

 

Day 23 of Jilly’s Unreason Challenge

23: “His mind’s all black thickets and blood”   from Songs of Unreason

Cradled

Those of us cradled gently,
basking in the warm gaze of the universe,
who blossomed quietly,
opening in love

we have deep roots

and we carry light within us,
and the silence of the living forest.

For Day 22 of Jilly’s month of Unreason. 

“The world that used to nurse us

now keeps shouting insane instructions.

That’s why I ran to the woods.”

~ Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason

What is the question?

He was a man who gathered facts
what does moonlight taste like?
as if he could build a world from them,
who first fell in love? with whom?
snatched dates and data from the atmosphere,
what do flowers dream of?
cross-referenced, indexed, filed.
what colour are my eyes?
He questioned endlessly, collated
can you hear a sunbeam strike the ocean?
all the answers, in boxes first,
where did I leave my keys?
then just in piles, great tottering heaps
what noise do Saturn’s rings make?
that rose around him,
what’s the gestation period of the unicorn?
and still, the world eluded him.

where does love live?

For Jilly’s 28 Days of Unreason, where we are all Jim Harrison tribute acts. Today’s quotation is:

“I see today that everyone on earth

wants the answer to the same question

but none has the language to ask it.”

~ Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason

She doesn’t want to write about love

She’s not going to write about love –
because everyone writes about love,
and everyone knows
that love is a rose
and love is a thorn,
and love is a glistening
bead of blood on a fingertip.

There’s so much more to life
than love – there’s moonlight,
and reading, and bottomless coffees,
but everyone knows that
love is a warm jolt of caffeine,
and love is a poem,
and love is the moon,
and love is a lone wolf howling,

and even when she strips
the metaphors out of her work,
writing a forest – a real one –
she drove there, and pressed her hand
into the bark of a tree
’til her palm was marked,
still everyone knows
that love is a tree,
and love is a forest,
and love is the road
that carries you there.

 

“Love is raw as freshly cut meat,

mean as a beetle on the track of dung”

~ Jim Harrison  from Songs of Unreason

 

Day 20 of this 28 day delve into the world of Jim Harrison. Jilly is hosting a month of Unreason. Check it out. There’s some great stuff being written there.

Babble

Did I babble? Did I spill the secrets

of my immediate desires, not deep,

not very deep, just basic stuff –

water.

Sleep.

Did I reveal myself, in my

vulnerability, my coming to,

my emerging from that hazing mist,

my brain stretching itself, releasing

small thought bubbles that had no

real life, just that primal craving –

water,

sleep.

“I’m quite tired of beating myself up to write.  I think I’ll start letting the words slip out like a tired child. “Can I have a piece of pie” he asks, and then he’s asleep back on the cusp of the moon.”

~ Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason

That Jilly is totally unreasonable, expecting us to keep up with this challenge! Day 19 of 28 Jim Harrison prompts. 

Mountains

I’ve walked the grey paths
beneath the snow line,
past streams carving the land
like knife blades,

and I’ve hung between here
and there,
on the ropes slung over
the abyss, trusting the builder.

I’ve been in the high places,
where you snatch at the air,
afraid of drowning. I’ve been
higher than eagles,

still straining to look higher.

 

For Jilly’s Unreason month, riffing on Jim Harrison quotations. Today’s is: 

“The mountains are so dominant
that some days the people refuse
to look at them as children
turn away from the fathers who beat them”

~ Jim Harrison  from Songs of Unreason

 

Truth

She has become adept at reading
in between the lines, at analysing
gaps and pauses. She understands
the elements in him that will
combine explosively, she knows
that history changes, dates
and meanings re-appraised,
eye-witnesses are blind,
the source material long gone.

She knows that boundaries blur
and shift, small wars declared,
and independence movements claimed.

All the stories that he tells
cast him as the hero – what does that
make her? The wicked witch?
Tempting with gingerbread?
The big bad wolf,all teeth
and slantways glances – or,
much worse, the second bride
of Bluebeard, destiny to find
the bloody chamber, and then
never leave? The bad girl
spewing vipers as she speaks?

Still, one and one make two,
Pythagoras holds true. He’s
made a physics that describes
a simple world, of billiard balls
and marbles. Under that, there
is a truth. She keeps on digging.

 

 “Nearly everything we are taught is false except how to read”

~  Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason

For Day 11 of Jilly’s totally Unreasonable month. 

 

 

Don’t turn the lights up yet

Some people can’t go home –
lips purpled with red wine,
she is still calling out
for one more song.

This is her home

in here, she’s 22, mistakes unmade –
the guy who never left his wife for her,
the casting agent who forgot her name –
vowing tomorrow she’ll get up and write
or paint, something creative, anyway –

she’s scary drunk,the slightest thing
might flip her into anger, or despair –

just one more tune, and one more drink –

the rest of us are tired, and useless,
and don’t understand. We all got old –
how did that happen? – she stayed young,
look at her, how she’s dancing,
shoes left somewhere, don’t know where,
bottle in hand

I’m worried she might fall.

life’s better when your head is buzzing,
full of dreams, dragged out and polished up

they still look golden when the lights are dim.

 

Day 10 of Jilly’s 28 days of Unreason-able Jim Harrison quotes. Today’s is:

“Just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.”

from Birds Again

~ Jim Harrison