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    In Search of Small Gods
    In Search of Small Gods
    In Search of Small Gods
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    In Search of Small Gods

    By Jim Harrison

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    About this ebook

    Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites--for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate.”--Salon.com

    In Jim Harrison’s new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of sight. In terrains real and imagined--from remote canyons and anonymous thickets in the American West to secret basements in World War II Europe--Harrison calls his readers to live fully in a world where Death steals everything except our stories.” In Search of Small Gods is an urgent and imaginative book--one filled with the spore of the gods.”

    Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren’t harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . .

    Jim Harrison is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Legends of the Fall and Shape of the Journey. A long-time resident of Michigan, he now lives in Montana and Arizona.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateDec 28, 2012
    ISBN9781619320895
    In Search of Small Gods
    Author

    Jim Harrison

    Jim Harrison is a poet, novelist and essayist. His trilogy, The Legend of the Falls, has been adapted for film.

    Read more from Jim Harrison

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    • 4/5
      The poems in Jim Harrison's In Search of Small Gods contains a modest lechery and reflective cynicism that might resonate with readers of Bukowski or Tanizaki, but even moreso Harrison's poetry is rooted in his natural environment. We hear frequent mention of birds, dogs, insects, fish, and all manner of small gods. They are symbols that hold a subterranean meaning, often thunderous, that Harrison invokes in his inquiries and reflections on memory, mortality, and being-in-the world.
    • 4/5
      The first book of poems (and short essays) by Jim Harrison. He's moved from Michigan to Montana but still as off hand and insightful. The book is more focused on time, being old, and death. He is fatalistic but it is an elegant fatalism. Looking forward to his other books of poetry.

    Book preview

    In Search of Small Gods - Jim Harrison

    Calendars

    Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio

    another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie.

    They’re a kind of cosmic business machine like

    their cousin clocks but break down at inopportune times.

    Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar

    but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons

    of greed and my imperishable stupidity.

    Of late I’ve escaped those fatal squares

    with their razor-sharp numbers for longer and longer.

    I had to become the moving water I already am,

    falling back into the human shape in order

    not to frighten my children, grandchildren, dogs and friends.

    Our old cat doesn’t care. He laps the water where my face used to be.

    Larson’s Holstein Bull

    Death waits inside us for a door to open.

    Death is patient as a dead cat.

    Death is a doorknob made of flesh.

    Death is that angelic farm girl

    gored by the bull on her way home

    from school, crossing the pasture

    for a shortcut. In the seventh grade

    she couldn’t read or write. She wasn’t a virgin.

    She was simpleminded, we all said.

    It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.

    She’s lived in my memory for sixty years.

    Death steals everything except our stories.

    New Moon

    Why does the new moon give anyone hope?

    Nevertheless it does and always has for me

    and likely does for that Mexican poet with no pesos,

    maybe a couple of tortillas, chewing them while sitting

    on a smooth rock beside a creek in the Sierra Madres

    seeing the new moon tilted delicately away from Venus,

    the faint silver light, the ever-so-small sliver

    of white enamel rippling in the creek, the same moon,

    he thinks, that soothed the Virgin in her great doubt

    over the swollen belly beneath her breasts.

    The fatherless son had two new moons in his forty days

    in the wilderness, the second one telling him it was time

    to become God and enter the beast of history.

    This poet, though, ignores the sacraments of destiny

    and only wants a poem to sing the liquid gift of night.

    Tomorrow

    I’m hoping to be astonished tomorrow

    by I don’t know what:

    not the usual undiscovered bird in the cold

    snowy willows, garishly green and yellow,

    and not my usual death, which I’ve done

    before with Borodin’s music

    used in Kismet, and angels singing

    Stranger in Paradise, that sort of thing,

    and not the thousand naked women

    running a marathon in circles around me

    while I swivel on a writerly chair

    keeping an eye on my favorites.

    What could it be, this astonishment,

    but falling into a liquid mirror

    to finally understand that the purpose

    of earth is earth? It’s plain as night.

    She’s willing to sleep with us a little while.

    Hard Times

    The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.

    I’ve made this path and nobody else

    leading crookedly up through the pasture

    where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.

    It is here where my mind begins to learn

    my heart’s language on this endless

    wobbly path, veering south and north

    informed by my all-too-vivid dreams

    which are a compass without a needle.

    Today the gods speak in drunk talk

    pulling at a heart too old for this walk,

    a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth

    of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

    Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names

    of a dozen friends who have died in recent years,

    names now incomprehensible as the mountains

    across the river far behind me.

    I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.

    Perhaps when we die our names are taken

    from us by a divine magnet and are free

    to flutter here and there within the bodies

    of birds. I’ll be a simple crow

    who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

    Age Sixty-nine

    I keep waiting without knowing

    what I’m waiting for.

    I saw the setting moon at dawn

    roll over the mountain

    and perhaps into the dragon’s mouth

    until tomorrow evening.

    There is this circle I walk

    that I have learned to love.

    I hope one day to be a spiral

    but to the birds I’m a circle.

    A thousand Spaniards died looking

    for gold in a swamp when it was

    in the mountains in clear sight beyond.

    Here, though, on local earth my heart

    is at rest as a groundling, letting

    my mind take flight as it will,

    no longer waiting for good or bad news.

    Often, lately, the night is a cold maw

    and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods,

    which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds,

    clearly divine messengers that I don’t understand

    yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.

    Sunday Discordancies

    This morning I seem to hear the nearly inaudible

    whining grind of creation similar to the harmonics

    of pine trees in the wind. My outrageously lovely

    hollyhocks are now collapsing

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