three sisters

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.


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.


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.


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.


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


Three Sisters


Bolts of Silk Mahler's Third

analogpress.net Blood Test Poem


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


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


I Saw the Chameleon

Rats and Mallards

Flight and the Wind Dark Sea

Four Celsius

Volo Volo

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.

three sisters

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