After Reading Jim Harrison's "Locations"

comedy and tragedy: sic vita
modeled 1891-92, cast c. 1902-1905
bronze
alfred gilbert
clark art  

After Reading Jim Harrison’s “Locations”

Today’s blunt lines: all my poems are born dead.

And: In the dark barn/a stillborn calf on the straw.

rope to hooves, its mother bawling/nearly pulled to death.

Why those and why not the soft buttocks, why not the guitar

and the song why not all those lakes and dunes?  Why not

pilots pulling the chord before the crash that everyone ran to

and its melting in its own steel skin (is that what they’re made

of back then?)  I’m reading you like a eulogy and you in-

tended that I bet, surveying your whole life or someone

else’s but still if nothing else it’s an attempt at reconciliation

without the traps of accuse and excuse.  You refuse to see it

any other way than this:  the dead have a breath or two left

in them after all.  Exhaling isn’t the end it’s just settling itself

on random near and far things, like duff, like lips, like the flap

of the shirt pocket he or she closes before they go out the door

to report or just to walk, to make a little noise or to make

no noise at all just to walk with the living and the dead in their head.