You’ll Float Too

I was fifteen feet up in the top of an apple tree cutting grafting budwood when I heard that Jim Harrison died. My wife came out to tell me the news. I climbed down the orchard ladder. I wrapped the budwood in a wet towel, rolled it up and stuck the roll in a cooler. From beneath the tractor seat I pulled out a gallon Ziploc baggie and took out my worn copies of Songs of Unreason (2011) and Dead Man’s Float. We walked out into the field and sat down beneath The Mower’s Tree. It is a three-hundred-year-old ash tree. When hands mowed fields by scythe, trees were left three-quarters of the way down the pasture so when they reached it at midday they could hole up out of the heat, drink hard cider and pass out, wake up and finish the field in the afternoon’s late cool.

I rolled a joint, we smoked and made love in the shade of the tree, and naked, lay back in the grass and read Harrison’s poems to each other.

I keep Dead Man’s Float beneath the tractor seat because I want to read “The Present,” “Tethered,” and “Thunder” whenever I please. Because there are times when I need the right kind of reminder.

Books have life to them. There is a life with them. Too few reviewers talk about where they read the book, how they lived with it. They write as if they’ve never left the office, as if the book they’re talking about was only read in-between classes and meetings. Don’t you read in fields, bars, tucked beneath a coconut palm, high, in the desert evening, on a rooftop, with your lover next to you, to your child laughing and teaching them to turn the page?

Why are so many so dull?

Where is the joy, the wonder, the ecstasy, unbearable pain, the sure knowledge of our deaths?

Where is the sun and the how does that summer dirt feel?

Poets and opium eaters, alchemists, hermits, highwaymen, seers, musicians, dervish seekers, sadhus, bush doctors, and river rats were sometimes one in the same person.

In the Rare Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, I sat in a small room, with the division director. We wore white gloves. I read the notebook Walt Whitman kept while working on the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. The early portion of the notebook is prose. A notorious paper hoarder, Whitman left no bare scrap unused. Book jackets were cut up and reused, tucked within the notebook pages. So knowing this, when, after the prose, there are two blank pages, you stop with him because you know something is about to happen. After the two blank pages, Whitman turns to verse. The very first line of verse he wrote:

I will not descend among professors and capitalists and good society…

If this is it, if this is all we have, why write dull poetry, why live a dull poem? Great poems never rose from the timid.

The rise of POD publishing has flooded the poetry market with barges of horrid shit. Armies of safe, clean, tone deaf poets spew unreadable lines at a rate only American capitalism could generate. Buk said writing a poem was like taking a “good hot beer shit” not that the poem should read like shit. What little sex is in poetry today is filled with neuroses. No one writes about plant propagation. This is because most poets don’t spend time around living tissues. No one just gets down and lets it go. So much ego is in their sex.

When you go down on a woman it is not about you.

When you stand beneath the massive sky it is not about you.

It’s not about you.

It’s about that wonder and the humility that comes with wondering about the vast. Of course...