Three Sisters
Poems
Edward Harsen
Three Sisters
Poems
Edward Harsen
Between Pieces Nothing Tastes Like Spaceman
Choosing Uselessness
Blood Test Poem
Dislocated
Goose against a Blue Salmon-Skin Sky
Piety
Kim Jong Il's Body
Subactual
Thank You, Maria Colvin
Only Seeing What is Near Clearly
Early Snow on Scarlet Ivy
on Winter Coming
Elementals
Rats and Mallards
Practice and Back
Mahler Two
Mahler's Third Symphony
Mahler Nach Tod
Mahler in His Middle Period: Symphonies 5, 6 & 7
Events Which Befall Our Yard
Interrupted by Perpetual Anger
I Saw the Chameleon
. As it May Have Been for Ruth and Boaz
Folk Songs
On Grenades of Our Own Design
for Epimetheus
Four Celsius
People are Most Like Mountains
Kerning
A Sublunary Picatrix
Three Sisters
Volo Volo
Finding the Footprints of Harm
Acclimatized
Sparrow Fall II
Monstrum after Prometheus
Flight and the Wine Dark Sea
My Country’s Like That Other Myth
Asymptotic Freedom in Quantum Chromodynamics
My Name is Hello
Quick Chaomance
Terracinth: Getting Balance Off Balance
Two Dreams that Distort Daytime
Caption for the Final Still
Sun Conjuncts Sunday
Genoscape
Emerson At Harvard Divinity
Vernal Migration
Collateral Labyrinth
North Through Stuyvesant Falls
Customs and Marriage
Planning Against Ignorance
Di Rimborso della Bestia Trionfante
Not So Much Your Suicide
That Bird, Some Time, This Road
Variation on a Theme
In Fog We Keen
Between Pieces
Stunned by winter's tympani
and how near as tapped mallets
the hail seems against glass,
there was plenty of time to hit
the buzzing oven alarm
on the trip down stairs,
picking up empty pop cans with
the pitched canvas kicks,
so I took a crossword guess,
made a phone call to mother
before attempting last week's dish sink
or water and a walk for the dog.
Easel lazes on spotted muslin
until the house chores ebb and let
sea foam swirl around my ankles,
yolk-yellow light my eyes.
Nothing Tastes Like Spaceman
We eat what aliens we might
sieve from our dark supposes.
They bring a tang of disbelief
to the back of the throat
when culled from those rickety
aluminum pie plate ships
flickering like fifties films
shot in the New Mexico skies,
peppered with far yellow stars.
Choosing Uselessness
The casement is all angles of maple:
sill, sash, top and bottom rails,
stile, stool and apron - solid wood.
Beside the window, branches
pound against the tide of the wind.
The moon cracks
the west crest of the canal,
plops down the poplar row
and rolls into the road.
Overhanging green swells closer
as heat and tree frogs screech
in the bell of the dark.
Stone in hand and wind-twisted,
I'm playing hopscotch
on the street chalk squares.
Blood Test Poem
Homework done and trash out --
my goal now is finish this meal without tears,
get to the kitchen and wrap the greens
and bones, little losses we won't toss.
There is no warning gong or whisper
when naiveté turns like found cream.
I carry your faltered wilting in my throat,
unwilling to swallow or vomit.
Three days until a pay check,
still no overdue bills, but even
blankets in a car would be enough
were I to lose sleep hearing you breathe.
Dislocated
I’ve dug myself a hole
in the right thigh,
and poured the concrete
to hold a mail box pole.
I’ve put port windows
over my kidneys,
and let the swallows in
under my chin.
Thumped like a bellows
and belching emptily…
the night asks,
“To whom? To whom?”
The chipmunks won’t come out
from under the lungs
and give up all the closet space
I’ve justly abandoned.
Goose against a Blue Salmon-Skin Sky
Windows make me want to be elsewhere,
stop me mid air so I can plan to be cold,
scan what I've got in the closet to layer
and entertain potential worlds here in the house:
high maple holding a stone statue squirrel;
shuddering estuary slate-still before the falls.
So I am as much sitting at the black coffee table
as in the coupe seat driving through Chatham,
the wind blowing God's thoughts into my head,
memorizing the river that shuttles the hills
with strands of snow fall, clouds drawn down,
forgetting the lines of my hands branching
from the pattern of scales and feather vanes.
Piety
He eats black
peppercorns
as a rule,
promising
a garlic,
aspirin,
tongue of fire
his body
can abide.
Kim Jong Il's Body
Kim Jong Il's body is corrupt and
following his spirit into corruption
Kim Jong Il's body is similar to
tens of thousands of other bodies
silent in the last days of autumn
Kim Jong Il's body can no longer
take nourishment as millions
of his neighbors
can no longer sustain their own lives
Kim Jong Il's body witlessly
stills to freezing like the Yalu
like the Chosin like the tractor
factory faces like the cabbage
in the can in the alley in the sooty air
Kim Jong Il's body cannot thank you
tries to bow but does not
wants to hold back each page of each book
but will not
wants to collect the last won from every
grandfather grandmother shoeless ghost
Kim Jong Il's body is smashed
in the bill of the oystercatcher
Subactual
Light weakly tunnels this cavern alive
with whipped and grabbing trees,
snow-bright stone verging shifty road,
a whole night whiteout wheedling doom.
From culvert-piped mud-shape shoulder,
congregated by cackling overpass, up the gravel
to stave pavement fall-off and tell on treachery,
little orange cone people string along,
big orange barrel people stand aside,
white striped companion horses
steady in their orange net paddocks.
Thank You, Maria Colvin
In a crater
in an apartment in Homs,
there is a satchel
of rip stop nylon
that will not melt
even at mortar temperatures,
covered now in pulverized stone -
a kit of necessity smuggled
to families become infernal
under a sin of shells arcing darkly
into hollow kitchens and gardens,
through air sick with your
last breath and the scorched flesh
from scores of Syrians.
Save a journal,
what does a witness pack
that's not already abandoned
at the end of the world?
You've brought back all we can take:
a boy lies in his shattered street,
belly rising and falling until he dies.
Only Seeing What is Near Clearly
There was no plan, there were pickets
leaning on the pool house;
and bordering the lawn, leaves
dense with the smell of working worms.
I put those things together,
didn't consider pending vines on my
pilgrimages to the compost heap,
satisfied to find the fence in snow,
and so stop throwing decayed food like
bilge into the open sea of the garden.
I wanted no confusion in the future,
having hallucinated half of childhood.
Some runaway boy packing pajamas
landed on the neighbor's concrete stoop,
stopped between home and farther.
Now, older and not home,
I wonder where the morning glories grow
but can't look too far into it -
such gifts may find and wreathe me
grieving the short-lived trumpets of dreams.
Early Snow on Scarlet Ivy
I see Peekskill Hollow deepen
as I roll over Hamburg Mountain,
ignore the pressure against my inner ear,
tricked eyes resting on the lesser Catskills
until the plunge past Breakneck Lane
curves an undercut stone bridge,
a lunge like sun down the ridge,
or your long slalom schussing a flurry of t-cells.
We are from a family of cancers
gracing early snow on scarlet ivy,
our relentless growth the same
as locust and sumac stacking chlorophyll
against every storm.
When the weather warms,
I'll hack at the light green sprigs
with a rush of blood
I just don't feel tonight,
all the pull of gravity and tomorrow
dwindling into the flats
below Heaven Hill Farm.
On Winter Coming
The clouds make this the safest Saturday so far this fall.
I’m wrapped up in a blue sweatshirt, and the chill’s just
there,
a skin’s distance: in all my hair, where my nerves end,
I’m aware of some uncertain bristling and almost shiver:
green breaks up in the tree leaves and gold takes over
in the hunger for sunlight from a blood-let scarlet sunset.
These days require years of kaleidoscopic concentration,
colored fragments floating in oil, spinning new
combinations:
More vitamin C; my boots; a breath of bay mist;
one night, no dreams; and another nothing but
waking in doubt, in sweat, in my double bed.
Separately, none of this is sensible, and that’s the point:
I glance at the constant watch face, a black obsidian
that gives back my eyes glassed over with the fear of
freezing,
and I’m numbed enough to watch this memory
yellow and deliberately disappear.
It’s got me; it’s got you; a street set with storefronts
and marquee lights stressing our own mannequins.
What apology can I make? To be in your way, or part of
it,
(another lovely dusk sky, another roadside flower stand,)
these screaming ruby dahlias are all I’ve ever wanted –
I’ll wade onto a baldly dramatic stage of your plans
and you’ll open me up again with your bare hands.
Elementals
The old women have a ritual for this place:
They go to the well and yell into it
until a breeze blows up.
They will tell you that a woman
years ago
yelled up a gale, houses were
flattened
and men were carried off
in the winds.
When seeds flew
into the famined fields,
two women shouted into the well
and rain came.
The well is older than the town.
It gives no water.
Rats and Mallards
When the roadway was dug up
for new drainage
and lifted from the bog,
it was summer, rainless,
the rats came from the heat
to our side of the parking lot,
climbing through the
poxy shrubs, where the summer
lawn ran brown into the
brown flower beds, and
I lay in a stupor and
watched them, acrobatic
in their berry-picking, and wondered
where rats live before
all the heavy front loaders
roar, before the by standing trees
heave easily out of the gravel,
before the pond gets
that ugly dust face.
I left before I heard an answer,
sobered up, stopped smoking—
last I saw the devil
he was teaching
the unhappy mallards to sing.
Practice and Back
The board tricks start before kickoff:
worn thin trashband shirts won't flap,
deck shoes, no holes, and jeans I can
goddamn bend in.
Rolling to the ball field hill is an
easy ride, a breeze past the spaniels,
two quick curves and lean into traffic.
I've had too many spills
on the downhill, face plants
getting this trip down fast enough--
wiping in the sand, on the curbs,
just to get momentum past the fire house.
So I show up on stage bloody,
waiting to stand and stare,
eye to eye.
You pop out of a car ride, hop
over the stopped cars on Main Street,
flip your hair off your face, perfect.
I learn my lines,
catch my breath,
sit down with you
forever and slowly
walk home.
Mahler Two
There are fingers involved
in the whole process, picking
vellum, penning, pouring
a plop of ink.
So there are hands
to push the piano
into a proper corner.
Did Mahler grab the chair,
abruptly jarring the desk?
Was he jumping up to
fix tea, swill port, pace,
to put off the first movement?
He had to write the beginning --
at some point, say, “I wait
no longer.” He cannot tell now.
My guess is a mind unfocussed
could commence the Resurrection.
One day, in the settling and side-lit
dust, he stirred a quiet fingertip.
Mahler's Third Symphony
Cool days, the pool too cold for a dip,
I am surprised to think that the night
is like a grave, hollow, solidly damp.
I wake up and Mahler is talking to me.
It is quite gibberish, and I wonder
if he is sleep walking.
He is taking forever to get to the point…
trumpeting and straying into old songs.
I sit up when he asks me to sing.
Mahler wants to hear pain and joy,
wants a summer’s relief, flowers
and satyrs’ wine and bread.
I sing for him the sleeping faces
of the children, and the night lightens.
An angel sits with me, no longer Mahler.
The deep cobalt sound of morning,
misterioso and very slowly,
climbs out of my eyes, into my sight.
Mahler Nach Tod
I am angry with Gustav
when, white as bible leaves,
we step into heaven, we eat,
and I see that was all he had planned.
"The Interpretation of Dreams" is still wet,
every panicked pickling
or bleeding beast of the mind
may be invited to pluck along the vined paths
or net fish with Peter, yet Mahler
trenches a paste-tasting oat meal
to sate the woad-faced young.
Freund Hein steps into the bone-colored
dawn, an E string plies just too taut,
wrong as a soprano shilling
a Schadow feast among saints,
long as furious life.
Mahler in His Middle Period:
Symphonies 5, 6 & 7
The train schedule is indiscernible:
some nights two or three horns in long morendo,
some silent while cold stars twist into the hills.
Our linden wood bed keeps the dreams of Kalist
that neither the burned chapel at Worthersee
nor my overly-anointed nerves can dispel,
half-waking reverie where I race to the gateless
rail grade in the now-dark morning,
wondering if we will ever meet, the freight and I.
Here was the trade off: a summer house
for beautiful Alma; proper caps and aprons
for the children; all at the cost of voices
and the years of organizing tone:
one wants the folk songs of childhood
sung in one's own tongue,
the translated feelings that flee to me
out of the day's meal, a shoulder-shrugged blouse,
these scuffed boots now covered in graveside mud.
Someone must write the kindertotenlieder,
directing the audience to inflect
in the presence of the intoning angels;
bow to the principal and the final A minor;
to a portrait of fever under weakening poultice;
this calling bell by the sea bringing today's need.
Roused out of the winter quilt's weight with
family embraced to my marionette frame,
I try again to teach the divine how to love us.
Events Which Befall Our Yard
I only knew the bat was there
by the dung on the ground.
The borer bees spill wood
dust over the trash cans.
There are branches to clear
before mowing, the sky
bluing where the storm
must have loitered,
shoulders hunched,
leaning into the red maples.
Shredded emerald leaves
float in the pool.
The yard’s shirt is untucked,
its pants rucked and laces untied.
Interrupted by Perpetual Anger
The insects have passed insistence
and are verging on malicious.
What are the pupal drosophilae
gleaning in a week that they
chew me?
Summer sun spots compete
with sudden shrieks since
cicadas lost their calendar,
each hot June cloud
strewing thumb-sized carcasses,
thrummed hollow.
And the sleepy bumble bees,
now simply mindful missiles,
fill my calf muscle with a serum
sickening enough to ground me,
buffalo-like and lowing.
Cherries rot on the counter
and the dog collects ticks.
Two locust tree shadows
turn to cool the pool water.
What am I forgetting?
I Saw the Chameleon
From your suit I knew
you had been in rain,
even after days of travel.
The blue plastic vinyl and tweed
weave train seats left an imprint.
Your hair smelled of distinct
Atlantic cities. But that is past.
Now you lay out a change of clothes
for the week to come:
in yellow you will be hungry
and lean eagerly;
the grey and pink will hold
you on your heels for perspective;
then the red plaid and exhaustion.
With flung hat and feet prized
out of shoes, you'll sink
into a deep suite chair, hide there
until the higher shadows wheel off,
the Arizona sun sets and
messages pass you,
indistinguishable from your future.
As it May Have Been for Ruth and Boaz
I walk past the house garden,
hear the songbird change keys.
Knowing you love me, I chuckle.
In your eyes, mine have time
to lose focus in the lawn's fall and rise
into spring green oak and maple.
Knowing you see me, I see perfectly.
Married today, this now becomes always,
and you and I
closer than the family that gave me,
closer than air against my breath.
And this is how I know forests
don't fight for sun, but delight
in each instant of tree become sapling,
life become life, your God my God.
Folk Songs
Huntington Bay is an incorporated village now,
a conglomerate of ballot-casting investors
who have never seen Camden,
never been to Brooklyn.
Where we eat our organ meats and root vegetables.
Some are family farmers, lone carpenters,
middle managers,
left to figure the lost folk dances.
The mechanic and deckhand are ancestors
we find a way to weave together,
draymen are truckers, the children are athletes,
the president - no one knows what the president is.
Staying with local tunes
when we go to a small potluck dinner,
there's a song we sing when your son or your mom
is in the hospital, a reel for the end of winter.
Few of us know a long waltz called "Moving the
School."
We ask the children to learn the twisting leaps
needed for Main Street staying alive.
We look for those who aren't too busy
to sing with us "Keeping in Touch
with Those Who are Out of Town."
We'll show whoever else needs it
how to keep fruit fresh for the picnic,
or an old rendition of "Decent cup o' Joe,"
or how to get to the grocery in the snow.
These are the dances we know.
And at holiday parties
we laugh about the jet packs that we don't have,
and how computers are going to take our jobs
as post-bellum shoemakers or hatters.
We laugh as we sing and steer,
dance and wrench, sew, wash, stow and carry on,
each singing what belongs to everyone else.
On Grenades of Our Own Design
One: Them
There is no doubt when someone gets it right
in science like Brautigan or poetry like Koestler;
(and you see what I did there:
I swapped them in the manner
of the standup comic, for effect,
because I've read the esoterica
that says this is how the brain works,
and I believe it).
These molders of outrage claymation knead
little knobs of words into a fast blurring smear,
solving the algebra of panic and repose
and dying by choice before us.
Two: Us
Even for a bedroom community
there were way too many bedrooms.
We had the crappy broom, we had the good broom,
we had a vacuum and a carpet sweeper
but we couldn't keep up with the hair
slowly woven around the edge of the apartment.
The cat was crying,
so we had to do something.
We moved the cat to a cardboard box,
then we moved the cat and the box closer to the door.
And the alarm clock freaked out anyway,
twice, for each of our mornings.
The cat was dying, and we flew apart like lucky birds.
Years later, one red and white rambling ranch
looks like another in St James' streets
and I couldn't get to that place
if you clipped me, caged and carried me.
Three: Me
I am racing to the traffic light
because I'm a list maker,
and that is what's next.
I might turn right at the red light,
it's my right to turn right at the red light.
I am fleeing chimp-like into meetings,
in tight shoes and itchy wool pants,
carrying rule books and building
a pinched consensus among the wood-like
tables and cooperative folding chairs.
I am in a twisted firing squad.
Some of our heads shoot blanks,
blameless as a new phone.
We're a rain of exploded social beasts
falling back on grenades of our own design.
for Epimetheus
To a God, what’s potential is most alive.
Re-forming, re-writing scripture,
the possible and the probable writhing
dragon and tiger in the high temples.
That valley of ten-thousand things is alive,
real and so dissolute.
When the tree line finally collapses,
and your idylls expire,
the last thing out of Pandora's pithos
will be the first thing entering a dead man's heart.
Just Hope’s gesture casts the world
in flecks of vermilion on the landscape.
Rodin leads out a bronze burgher’s chin
and in dim and sooty lamp light
we find "The Potato Eaters."
But you remember:
Sheltered in a copse of slowing heartbeats,
after the acrid escape of every ill into existence,
a stunned and foolish girl leaned in to look.
Four Celsius
Bole-mate of gray rabbits,
red maple root fretter:
under the ground runs Jack o' the Green.
He told me the tips of twigs
and whistled me a steam air
over frozen dark moss.
He danced a single jig of snow
letting go, a treble jig for ice flow.
I huddled and huffed blue belief,
I hunkered yes, shuddered
and shivered please, Jack,
scuttle frost, smuggle me Spring.
People are Most Like Mountains
I want to think of other people as though
they were complicated pieces
of classical music, and I want to say
that loving you is finding the unknown
like walking in on a symphony in progress.
But I have had the quaint, quick vertigo of the road
rolling through the east flank foothills,
Nebraska, maybe the Dakotas.
At the floor I learned to see mountains
that seem to step gigantically
and stand along the highways.
This is how people are: objects that
can be seen from space; blank or baldly featured
places that can take teams to climb.
People can be off in the distance, changing color
and size, relative to the weather,
relative to the route to work.
I know people that have come to live happily
with herds of antelope swarming inside;
people who have a handful of trees,
but these are sequoia. I know people
who only know ice.
I want to say I size people up like ballads cut
to three-oh-five for airplay, that I could
find you on a radio top ten
from the forties, that you are
in the Great American Song Book.
But people are really most like mountains.
I have been traveling for years,
and still have not seen all of you,
still haven't died in your snow squalls,
or been called by all the voices
singing in your springs.
Kerning
On a furling bolt of vapor
In light draped on the river,
we fall in love from elsewhere,
and fit our alabaster shells together.
Now with power over human bodies
we curl away from youth like cooling ferns.
The green hills are farther run,
the leaves more crisply done.
They fly to us, our fingers
interlace under an unending sun.
A Sublunary Picatrix
I am facturing a bird of fortune,
trying to find significance in geese.
They bray meaning to the trees,
and if I am waiting or worried,
thinking about food, listening to children,
I make a mental note,
but the goose-sign so far seems to be encrypted.
Over the Hudson River a white crane
imitates a gull. I mistake the crane
anyway for the cow egret, who, African,
crossed the Fernando de Noronha Plain
to Brazil and bred north, a bird determined.
I should mention how I surprised
a Great Blue Heron at Tiana Bay.
There was an inhuman eye, fully round,
fakily set like that in a blond teddy bear.
Struck clear gold and unthinking, an eye
like a sword-straight beak, like backward knees.
So my folklore follows from
my caprice: when the killdeer screeches
I reverse course; whistle with the thrush
to freely pass him on the street;
gesture minutely to the red tail hawk
so the mice get a head start.
Seeing one crane means there is one crane.
Seeing a heron means I am impossible.
Three Sisters
Change overcame me in the Cascade Range.
The McKenzie-Bend Highway runs west from
Deschutes,
along Three Sisters,
into the Santiam shadow of Three Fingered Jack,
and the glacier lying like a coin in his palm.
I drove all day under the eyes of that family
as they held up the sky,
swerving past a chattered and volcanic shoulder
and phoning in from some
wayside wide spot to ask the way,
likely way late getting to a party,
just to sleep on the floor,
worn, story-filled, travel-famished.
When my sister died
it was like a minaret had fallen,
like one of the pillars that hold up heaven had fallen.
Heaven didn’t fall,
but the slopes and peaks are more delicate,
as though one must walk barefoot across
the great floor of the earth,
under a ceiling that seems at times to tip.
Teardrop Pool on South Sister
fills with spring snowmelt.
When called to pray,
I turn to the center of the world.
Volo Volo
My separation from heaven is false,
vertiginous and beautiful,
even as clouds pass the moon,
moon passes the stars.
Dawn is damn miserable until
the crows begin feeding in the street.
They are here to bow and scrape
their dead for food and normalcy,
as if wished iridescent into life,
into the mist that is melting snow.
I'd forgotten the dragons of winter
that lay drowsing in the ice-laced vales.
This damply sharp morning,
when the birds and I
slow down under the sky,
festival dragons ascend through us.
Finding the Footprints of Harm
One
What anyone may call a good walk waits,
a last bit of measuring I take today.
Like breaths in a temper, or sheep to sleep, I’ve counted
steps from the click of the house door, down the slate
stairs.
My time passes in how used the toys are:
The yellow plastic trike with the push handle
is freshly discarded, outgrown. When the children are
young,
one day has twenty smiles, or thirty.
And when their suits stretched, too small, we said they
were
eighteen months, because they had no years.
It seemed forever before their feet held them.
I cannot tell how long
I have tried remembering when the small things changed.
Yesterday, you fell only twice. You said, “God!”
You said, “no, no, no,” and I am still surprised.
You said, “I am too young to feel this old!
What did I do in my last life that left me like this?”
And I have no idea what is going on, I have used
up all of my schooling, and now put my imagination into
stamina. We are outside the city limits, and I am lost.
Two
There is self-examination, interrogatory
contradiction in harming to stop harm.
Sera, re-breaks, traction, chemotherapy, torture.
And you would spread open your own breastbone
Looking for a warm heart that is completely unknowable,
(the adversary is alive in God’s stead.)
Slink with the alien abductor, (to know what they know.)
Fly on the Sabbath night (to see! to see!)
Find yourself in the gray bridal gown, stalking a
misunderstood prisoner.
There is no charm, there grows no bane for the unnamed
harmer.
The witch and the werewolf are called out of their night’s
sleep
to fight for the crops, and the side of right, in Jesus’
army.
Just so, chronic pain is a molester during rest.
A woman may take canis lupus as a totem into her hands,
even as grip gives way in neurological deterioration:
The terror is living by choice.
Forcing a twisted limb into your chest should look like
transcendent reclusion, but it is merely how angels are
modeled into statues.
Three
Rain continues to fall and I am
ashamed of my naiveté.
Let me give you the dead of winter:
ice sadly parts for the cold rain,
that later impishly freezes and grips.
Attend the blackbirds,
we can ignore them no longer.
See the wing print they leave
Sweeping into the garden--
angels of death without season.
Pitiless as the morning star, blackbirds
are the only living thing in the stiff January skies.
Eating the old seeds, huddled under gusts,
They bark at dawn, skim low and
dawdle in the road.
The rain stops.
The blackbirds go on.
Coda
About things we make together:
children, opinions, a peaceful view
of falling birches beyond the patio door;
More often, I am agreeing with the dog.
When you are away, he waits by the door,
and howls his reprimand when you come home.
Come home. Even if it is to retrieve
a thing forgotten --
When you go, return.
Acclimatized
You have been after that banana for days,
had junky food up to your eyes,
had some bad water in seventy-five,
dysentery, too.
They start so green, the plantain,
so spider-rich and rigid, they are
dismissible in the contusing dawn
of straw, black, blue, goose and salmon
berries.
So at noon, soup.
Later comes thunder in the snow storm,
you step out of the kitchen,
down the stairs, into the garden, to see.
But the sound is gone; the night holds all
that is gone: somewhere in the snow
lie lavender and rose.
Back in the kitchen, rooting through
the cabinets, for flour and baking soda, salt
all pouring white into the bowls,
you can only peel and mash the banana now.
For bread, and a warm oven.
Sparrow Fall II
I can’t seem to put my talon on it:
The deep, darkroom depressions,
whiskey-soaked breakups,
all seem to be part of an ascent.
Mosquitoes could drain me for hours
and I would stand up and walk the blood
back into my legs. Maybe it was cold,
maybe summer, and the road dogs chased.
They will tell you I was morose in those
aeries, that I flitted fitfully in puddles:
Stories we can agree on, like we were walking
in a graveyard, or we were at the shore.
When I came crashing out of that heaven,
there were no clouds left, shredded stars
lit my aura, the world was in other peoples’ eyes.
I am no longer a gargoyle, and that
is what is startling. Not alone
in the low cielo. Where I fell there was
a book to read, a chair, and grace.
Monstrum after Prometheus
Where were you when the blacksmith struck?
Smuggling across the Great Smokies,
or the Sudan, with the cows so sad and dry.
Well, everyone took your story for their own,
Nestle, and Kennedy, and choristers
from Coptic novels:
The Titan asked the God for favor,
and was punished for defiance.
That we were shackled, not by our actions,
but by our enzymatic presence:
I shoveled the snow, my neighbor held
the screen door open, fed my dog,
and I watched the kids –
that was the twist. Living in the same building,
we pulled each other into a gut-wrenching future.
We know you lied, having now the tools to tell.
With the quantum well lasers in our toys,
And the world wide walkie-talkie in our hands,
The end repeats again:
Tail feathers light on the gargantuan sea.
Flight and the Wine Dark Sea
“Gravity is our future.”
- Michael Douglas
The picture you have seen is set in marble on a parapet.
We are in profile,
etched in motion, my arms outstretched, his flailing.
It looks, for all the ages, like I have pushed him over the
edge.
I work in stone and wax; reed and thatch; I mound moss
and help the herms rise.
There is no trick with twine escapes my eyes, my fingers
figure knots,
plot the plait of tangles in the finest hair. I am a crafter.
And as if that were a crime, the gods keep me as a pet.
I cannot create. I build or form, mold and make, but I am
not free.
There are no gods that live by pattern long.
There is Protocol, the god of social norms,
whose minions are timing, polity, spelling and grammar.
There is Sanitation, the god of the anti-bacterial whose
song is the squeak.
They are invisible and difficult to relay to a child.
How big a bite is too big? Are your hands really clean?
Or explain how Harmonics uses Wagner:
let the slow tripping of the pizzicato bring you to a glen’s
edge where sun beams
among prickly leaves sawing in the breeze too easily.
How can a brass horn
sustain and abate a major chord to trick me into thinking
I have laid down my head?
A god can grind psychically to a halt
and command the Minotaur to tell us there is no escape,
not in the way we watched our giddy children held by
spinning in place.
Nor is there captivity, as the boundless bell of the sky
rings fiercely down,
and one is pinned.
Listen to me son - Daedelus pushes, over and over. He is
precipitous or possessive,
panicked or simply potent. Some say that on another
tower he killed the partridge Perdix.
The boy always falls to earth, taught by a goddess to fly,
or caught by men like Brueghel.
Find me in these divine constructs, unable to stop solving
mazes and puzzles,
in the webs and strings I weave into ravenous wings,
prepared for you to leave.
My Country’s Like That Other Myth
Down the street, Hope makes her legs work, a scary
sight, enough
Sway to question, “How long has she been out?”
Out of her house of disease, and tremor, and infection.
Amazing that her oldest buildings have the most craft in
the carvings, the most
caress, like the workers in Philadelphia sat and thought
up a republic and spent years fashioning fantastic
architecture.
Hope doesn’t have that kind of time, can’t get thirty of
her friends together, Pestilence and Greed, say, to lay out
a foundation and brick in the pattern of a publican’s. She
can’t
sit and chisel the necessary gargoyles, spin fifty white
newels, trim the keystone, fit it, take it out and place it
again, make another and fit that keystone, pull it out in
frustration,
go home for a long meal and a walk to the forge for
another peen, return two days later and chip out the
highest bit of prayer.
Up the road, Hope is loathing the tone of high noon, the
turn in mid stride that interrupts her pledge. The quality
care and feeding still go to Despair and Strife, to Terror
and Typhus.
And the republic gets back-burnered, time borrowed
from, oh, food, basically. And the pursuit of the contents
of Hope’s tremendous home. The Love it will take to put
the
finish to this peak is more terrible than any in history,
real or imagined.
Asymptotic Freedom in Quantum
Chromodynamics
In particular, at low temperatures neither quarks
nor gluons can exist in isolation. This peculiarity
of QCD – that the basic entities of the theory cannot
be isolated – is called confinement. It is, as you
might imagine, one main reason the theory took
so long to find.
-Frank Wilczek
Where are you when I am at fault’s edge,
walking a one-way avenue
as sun alloys a cast aluminum noon?
A couple at the pannier’s points me
to brown bread around cheddar, a slice of white onion
and wetter mustard mashed with horse radish.
Without question, grackles hassle hawk,
who has found an emerald owl’s nest
between firs on the road to Bend.
Odin Falls are posed this moment
of Mercury on the Libra/Scorpio border.
Moon smears a run uphill
to transit a high kitchen table,
measuring hedgerow by headstone
on a path cut across the lap of the tor:
I want that road in my dreams.
I’ll be both visiting and leaving,
consoling and grieving as faces rive.
I’d know if I were undertaking
or keeping ground for the dead.
I’d wait for the ice of age by doctors’ time –
forty, maybe fifty years, until blood and semen
soak the Oort, deep in Pluto’s wealth.
When darkness and light are finally both alike
and the livid blood reminds to let learning go –
whatever comforter covers and suffers
to muffle the melt dropping in steps:
this hot shower, this tea, this time
of any tenebrous break, seem final, too.
A point of swallow parts for scarlet hummingbird
as rain falls in lilac and falls
in the thorn field at the dell floor.
Coyote wakes me and I’m wanting
an alley through winter’s green.
My Name is Hello
Hanging with the badly-clad
I catch, like moonlight, looks
from doom-filled people.
Work-bound, burrowing muddy air
between room window and windshield,
swearing by a lost
pair of glasses, a digital watch,
at a pace to miss rainbows
but see forsythia, white dogwood.
You won’t crawl near enough
for fear of what else
will flower and flee
this one more lousy weekend.
I use the clouds
to see you in another body,
tree, or stone or someone
behaving like tree or stone.
Jump to a sudden thud
somewhere close
and lock the door –
you think to sleep
but hell, you want
some news, a messenger
or monster coming for you.
Quick Chaomance
the new moon died in town today
over the veteran’s pillar,
folks walked right into traffic
like priors wading in mist.
they’ll set the clocks back tonight,
so I’ve time enough to sleep:
I want to watch this maple shed gold
and bare nerve to the sky.
there will be freezing rain tomorrow,
and all the sorcerers of this warm autumn
haven’t the magic to stay it.
Terracinth: Getting Balance Off Balance
Muck smells at first thaw –
as last year’s dying finally does,
fields push flowers into air.
Birds have ground to a halt in this low sky,
the graphite lake brittle below.
Rowboats don’t line up for long.
drifting foam beside its fabric yellows.
Walking the house wall round
I’m beside myself and giddy,
perhaps grasping
the two of this questioning thumb:
In our leaf shape, we space out;
expecting dreams, hands fill up;
the leaves fall away
and slowly buried, a tree.
So far, in these dimensions,
I’ve cornered distance once.
Now, down an empty road,
I can feel the edge of sight in my feet,
hear space recede between atoms.
Knee deep, I’m lumbering to the door.
There’s no point to a current calendar,
picturesque and at eye level:
Seasons are full of moon,
rocking forward and back on spokes.
Two Dreams that Distort Daytime
It will be, after all, hours before I get to sleep;
me and my repetitive behavior, pacing this room.
I’m here often, arms in the grain of wood panels,
these legs becoming russet twill rugs.
Cold morning floor tiles at the north end are not,
well, obvious, but sensible certainly,
the way I know I’m waking alone as thoughts stagger in,
holding onto each other in a renewed effort to stand
and speak between clenched teeth.
Sometimes it’s harder deciding which lamp to light,
or whether to raise the blind over the window,
than pulling out a pair of pants, socks, shoes
when my body becomes re-inhabited. But where do I
appear?
Who says hello, holding me steady with closed eyes?
Somewhere, you sweep your kitchen, and in the air
a pale scent of the soap I use, like a smile
at your wall hangings, settles along the furniture.
There’s a telephone ringing, cars seem to pull up
at the sidewalk, one after another, and a shuffling dog
snuffles at the door. Any of these may bring me:
patina of a person outside his immediate life,
dancing on a thin line of afternoon sunlight.
You must remember to tell me –
are those stars painted nearer than I might believe?
Even there, if I were reach out for the haste of touch,
would that precious searing of light smear
in its perfect perspective of depth
and the distorted joys of dimension?
Then who would I turn to? Who, after the last song,
is delighted enough to leave the dancehall, walk through
one gate
along a familiar cinder path and knock at this welcoming
door?
There are some things in the autumn air which I cannot
seek out,
which must choose to fly down with sudden streaks of
oak leaf
to pierce my chest and, quaking, wake me again and
again.
Caption for the Final Still
Our gauche expanse
of hand-made drapery deadened
the deafening echoes,
but that blasted life story of yours
finally stupefied me.
When I stopped loving you,
we owned the middle of a river,
and that flow swiftly twisted
around the entire house
before carrying the candy,
blue chair and couches
out to the calm sea.
Now I search the ground for splintered beams
to toss into the sun-struck stream
and dam those home movie scenes:
Shoving myself from room to room,
packing only the loosest clothes,
stumbling in front of my own gunpoint.
Any exciting dialogue
has been miniaturized into advertisements,
exploded on road signs,
tongue-twisted into clanging
machines I coax along
these walls of memory and desire
for the incredibly red collisions.
Your portrait in mosaic
moves through changes of expression:
A full moon’s cycle of eyebrow
swept up in surprise;
the cheekbone equinox
shifting shadow across your nose,
its bridge swayed slightly.
The bare eyelashes
have just begun to fill
with full green leaves,
and pebbles, summer wet,
smooth your brow.
Sun Conjuncts Sunday
I rub my scarred cornea,
brush a bread-specked platen down,
then mow the whole visual field:
Map and pen get swept across dust
edged out by routine place-setting
and dispatches about local property.
Folks bristle at the carve of a corridor
already lined with rimed pine tines
and wraiths bricking against the boulevard.
A hand there smoothes blueprints,
pivoting burnisher in smallest parry
to flick at the nits of drying glue.
Morning is a few mugsful of dance:
I samba slow to the cat mewling;
turn an amusing Peabody at the crossword puzzle;
spin into a buttered bagel polka
like waltzing Mount Hood, ibex-kneed.
Genoscape
A healing brain gestes trine endocrine,
brazes these holovolts, duff and grain.
To leave a town’s a hard kick,
biking into overfield wind.
The moon’s road-hidden roots
lien on ease to sprint
some wholly simple ripple.
Hic et nunc, no prophecy but memory:
A lure’s flight path;
a tongue-dug tooth of cormorant song
on the scale of heaven’s lute.
In the symptoms at onset
of this season’s fever,
muscles ravel slow around
ears bound to a burst
and absent wavecast…
In one heard heartbeat
are twined helices maying.
Emerson at Harvard Divinity
Sweet the thrush brings deception, and the wine is out of
season.
From Spring we have griev’d for what hasn’t happened,
wasted
nines, evensong; and haven’t seen our families since
Christmas.
Lo, the Genius of our Administration has brought forth a
poet
to sharp Our Lord’s thorns. Steep’d in community three
decades, and now
besought to look, oh inward, for the pulse pushing Piety,
or the true
ignominy: I will have enough trouble with a parish, my
poverty
and the artfulness of the seven sins. In illness best seek
hospice.
Certainly this private Prince is alone in the world,
closeted in prayer;
yet closeted in thought, deed and further depriv’d of
compassion.
Any common cluck has read the Vedant: What
contradiction is this?
We are told not to Tell; sought not to Seek; taught not to
Teach.
Gracious God, weakly we thank Thee, and more weakly
still, Humanity.
The races and faiths of ages rising from debasement to
debasement
are further abus’d by the rule of Holy Days, coupl’d with
such
precious lavation. Jesus, Jesus and your sparrow are
falling.
Vernal Migration
Before the cold broke this weak winter,
enough sun on anonymous deciduous trees
to lift hope into my nose
caught me mid step, ambivalent.
Cold lifting was so hard a shift in plan
that I grew madder in the bright parking lot,
and so broke into the garage to warm
at the weak electric baseboard.
I lifted drop cloths like rough disguise
away from weak ladder back chairs,
each old and irredeemable two inch
rib of wood broken under dust’s weight.
Tomorrow, should day break cold,
I'll wander in the warming dawn
about the reservoir, where a white cloud
of green apple blossom lifts into the hills.
Collateral Labyrinth
All eight species of grass in the yard
fail under the umbrella of the maple,
and in unimpeded Kinderhook spring rain
mud now bubbles around the flat
black stones joined at the red brick wall.
These days our old dog legs north,
so I set those blocks to stand
in wet moss where roots knot up,
wobbling my best guess at a gait
to tread in the maze onward.
North through Stuyvesant Falls
The black and white mourners
move too fast across the cemetery,
I am afraid they'll regret how brief
was this cool Friday afternoon.
We learn from cinema
that movement is shift in perspective:
Uncle's unfocused eyes and stiff cowboy hat
over Aunt's chiffoned shoulder,
then black-vest, white-shirt Uncle in relief
against a muscular John Muir horizon,
billowed cumulus and permanent hills.
Grandmother up close is sunken and still,
reluctantly planning how to walk back
to Pats Lane through the tussocked fescue,
the wind-borne cottonwood seed
and virtually impenetrable may flies.
Customs and Marriage
This family is fretting
the first gate, quietly demanding
of their pants and jacket pockets
the boarding passes they'll produce
for the disinterested inspector
whom I pass, losing sight
and the swirl of their soft panic,
until again at the flight gate
they are unstill,
searching out other pouches,
changing hats and draping
themselves in tassell-shawled
prayer, binding and unbinding
a final, recited security check
so they become indestructible
together.
Planning Against Ignorance
We were wondering about how spring
and the wood thrush return, gentle
until their eggs need defending,
and my eyes crossed at the horrible thought
that I had to chase the chipmunks
from their warrens along the house
and down the side of the pool wall,
out of suspicious nests amid anthills
and under the unruly ivy.
The fluting thrush, at least,
try hiding higher.
Back-pedaling across the lawn
to see late July light whiten
old siding and pine rails,
the eaves-hung lettuce and basil
we part delicately and harvest
darken to violet in the on-set night.
I stop where the gate will be,
heft of the barely grasped rocks
will lay here, the ground unswaying.
I rely on the ground to stay.
Di Rimborso della Bestia Trionfante
I recognize the Book of Genesis
now as a to-do list with some
low-hanging fruit already picked.
No need, for example, to cloud:
storming or fogging in the morning
has been taken care of.
The willow and wisteria stay thinned
among gnarled cherries and berries
in the north lawn, given mostly to moss.
And the children grow tall,
as they are supposed to do.
But there is clearing out and some
creaturely crying left undone
from the fifth day, and if not written
it's hinted that the stars
are to be used as semaphore,
a visible vow in the closely woven
firmament, so you and I can create
the blue moon, the red dusk,
and each eclipse return, equinoctial
as the wedded exiles we have become.
Not So Much Your Suicide
Winter grit gets kicked inside and
glitters at the open door's edge
where my shadow passes your death,
its truth how I hold the turned handle,
strip off this thin denim
and flinching, narrowed hood,
face unfurling before the rowed
pots of soaking cut begonias and
the estimable days they'll have.
I am dismayed more by belligerent
Spring, clinging first to the fresh earth,
where I'll fight for my next foot steps,
my weight of lessening consequence.
This Bird, Some Time, That Road
Just west of Tuxedo,
Wildcat Mountain weathers
midsummer with dry brook beds,
our line of cars driving wily past
Indian Kill Lake peels a few locals
off to Pumpkin Hill Road
and the rest roll down to Warwick,
weaving deceleration.
Shoulder-side, a green racer escapes
ess-wise to the nearby
jagged granite wall.
Something happens, not grand:
a solid ripple rolls bright green
through the pond where the May
goslings needed no help hatching,
the grounded tercel feeds on
a frankly red and stringy squirrel,
bland, sufficient as the reedy
crane dipped knee-deep in bracken,
calm as the white kitten
sitting like a teed ball on the lawn.
A killdeer plover struts stiffly
across her widow's walk of river stone,
no fooling now.
At Hood River, chaparral heat shoos
rattle snakes into the cool streets.
I see an owl settle where
some restless rodent didn't,
the rattlers too hot to hunt.
I am here to find an old man,
whom I will pull with the horn of my beak
through the bones of my feet
to fill my future skin and skull.
Variation on a Theme - after W. S. Merwin
Thank you for the spare hair
holding the sword and the hard
hat reminder held crown height
for the corners of cinder block
or gypsum board from where
I have walked hiccupping grace
for the lawn cut away from the stone path
that creeps into the copse détente
of cherry and fir and the rotted poplar
feeding the irrepressible beasts
thank you for the festooning
laundry that starts in gift boxes goes
to rumpled poses and carries my daily crumbs
the invisible burbling code of bone
marrow become fluid blood
guiding my hands to tea
for the tea as heater tea as healer
the lingual turn from loud cantina crowd
to crow blatant on the road
In Fog We Keen
In fog we keen to passing flax sails
stretched across the shoulders of a gale,
though wheeling tern and gull cry
with our same sea-washed throats,
reason slit insensate as coral slices sodden skin.
We only know the shallow world by spasmed reach,
where turtles are swift beasts,
where slicked green feeds the spark of trevally,
and granite crevice clamps on ballast sunk
unclaimed by half-beings, we hoarders of need.
Were your seafarers cast aside?
Perhaps we wanted those untended fires in the wind;
wanted more the roaring angels of wind,
who arrive by spar and cloth; or further,
the purpose of those angels, destination.
Acknowledgements
These magazines and blogs have published some of the
poems in this book:
2010
Wood Coin to Business
2011
Apollo's Lyre People are Most Like
Mountains
analogpress.net Elementals
As It May Have Been for Ruth
and Boaz
Sublunary Picatrix
I Saw the Chameleon
2012
BloGnostics Early Snow on Scarlet Ivy
Only Seeing What is Near
Clearly
Acclimatized
Four Celsius
Interrupted by Perpetual Anger
Three Sisters
Thank You, Maria Colvin
Bolts of Silk Mahler's Third
analogpress.net Blood Test Poem
Finding the Footprints of Harm
Rats and Mallards
Kim Jong Il's Body
On Grenades of Our Own
Design
Poetry Bay Kerning
Between Pieces
Long Island Quarterly Dislocated
Street Magazine Digital
Interrupted by Perpetual Anger
People are Most like Mountains
Quick Chaomance
Mahler in His Middle Period
Sublunary Picatrix
Three Sisters
Folk Songs
Goose against a Blue Salmon-skin Sky
On Grenades of Our Own Design
I Saw the Chameleon
Rats and Mallards
Flight and the Wind Dark Sea
Four Celsius
Volo Volo
Copyright ® 2013 Edward Harsen & Pushmixx Media
Corporation
Edward Harsen works in New England and the Mid Atlantic, where he manages commercial properties. Edward spent fifteen years in the printing trade, during which time he worked for Street Magazine, Street Press and Suffolk Life. Edward’s poetry has been published by analogpress.net, BloGnostics.net, Wood Coin and Street Press. He has also written several white papers on contract management. He lives in Valatie, NY, with his wife Jeanine and two children, Johnathan and Sebastian.
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