IUnbind my hair, she says. The night is white and warm,the snow on the mountains absorbing the moon.We have to get there before the music begins, scattered,elliptical, needing to be drawn together and sung.They have dark green voices and listening, there are birds,coal shovels, the glazed hysteria of the soon-to- be-dead.I suspect Jesus will return and the surprise will befatal. I’ll ride the equator on a whale, a giraffe on land.Even stone when inscribed bears the ecstatic. Pressed tosome new wall, ungiving, the screams become thinner.Let us have the tambourine and guitars and forests, fruit,and a new sun to guide us, a holy book, tracked in new blood.
[Unbind my hair, she says. The night is white and warm]
Jim Harrison
Feature Date
- January 28, 2021
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Excerpted from COLLECTED GHAZALS: by Jim Harrison.
Published by Copper Canyon Press 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Jim Harrison.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Andy Anderson
Andy Anderson
Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man’s Float (2016). His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Regarding his most beloved art form, he wrote: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.” Jim Harrison certainly spoke the language.
Port Townsend, Washington
As a young poet, Jim Harrison became enamored with ghazals—a poetic form rooted in seventh-century Arabia which became popular in the United States through the translations of Rumi, Hafiz, and Ghalib. While he ignored most of the formal rules, within the energized couplets he discovered a welcome vehicle for his driving passions, muscular genius, and wrecking-ball rages. The year Harrison’s Outlyer & Ghazals appeared, The New York Times honored the book with inclusion on their coveted “Noteworthy Titles” list, provocatively noting that these poems were “worth loving, hating, and fighting over.” Collected Ghazals gathers all of Harrisons’s published ghazals into a single volume, accompanied by an afterword by poet and noted ghazal writer Denver Butson, who writes that with this collection, Harrison’s ghazals “are ours to witness again in all their messy, brave, honest, grieving, lustful, longing humanity.”
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