Maatstaf. Jaargang 30

[p. 51]

Jim Harrison Walter of Battersea

for Anjelica

‘I shall commit suicide or die
trying,’ Walter thought beside
the Thames-at low tide and very
feminine.

Picture him: a cold November day,
the world through a long lens; he's
in new blue pants and races the river
for 33 steps.

Walter won. Hands down. Then lost
again. Better to die trying! The sky
so bleak. God blows his nose above
the Chelsea Flour Mills.

What is he at 40, Nov. 9, 1978, so far
from home: grist for his own mill; all
things have become black and white
without hormonal surge.

And religious. He's forgiven god who
for the one hundred ladies turned him
down and took him up. O that song -
I asked her for water and she gave
me kerosene.

No, visions of Albion, no visions at all,
in fact, the still point of the present winding
about itself, graceful, unsnarled. I am
here today and gone tomorrow.

[p. 52]

 

How much is he here? Not quite with

 

all his heart and soul. Step lightly

 

or the earth revolves into a berserk

 

spin. Fall off or dance.

 

 

 

And choosing dance not god, at least

 

for the time being. Things aren't what

 

they seem but what they are - infinitely

 

inconsolable.

 

 

 

He knows it's irony that's least

 

valuable in this long death watch.

 

Irony scratching its tired ass. No trade-offs

 

with time and fortune.

 

 

 

It's indelicate to say things twice except

 

in prayer. The drunk repeats to keep

 

his grasp, a sort of prayer: the hysteria

 

of the mad a verbless prayer.

 

 

 

Walter re-crossed the bridge which was

 

only a bridge. He heard his footsteps

 

just barely behind him. The river is not

 

where it starts and ends.

[p. 53]

After reading takahashi

for Lucien and Peter

Nothing is the same to anyone.
Moscow is east of Nairobi
but thinks of herself as perpetually west.
The bird sees the top of my head,
an even trade for her feathered belly.
Our eyes staring through the nose bridge
never to see each other.
She is not I, I not her.
So what, you think, having little
notion of my concerns. O that dank
basement of ‘so what’ known by all
though never quite in the same way.
All of us drinking through a cold afternoon,
our eyes are on the mirror behind
the bottles, on the snow out the window
which the wind chases fruitlessly,
each in his separateness drinking,
talk noises coming out of our mouths.
In the corner a pretty girl plays pinball.
I have no language to talk to her.
I have come to the point in life when
I could be her father. This was never true before.
The bear hunter talked about the mountains.
We looked at them together out of the
tavern window in Emigrant, Montana.
He spent fifty years in the Absaroka Mountains
hunting grizzly bears and at one time, wolves.
We will never see the same mountains.
He knows them like his hands, his wife's
breasts and legs, his old dog sitting outside
in the pick-up. I only see beautiful mountains
and say ‘beautiful mountains’ to which he nods
graciously but they are a photo of China to me.
And all lessons are fatal: the great snowy owl
that flew in front of me so that
I ducked in the car; it will never happen again.
I've been warned by a snowy night, an owl,
the infinite black above and below me to look

[p. 54]

 

at all creatures and things with a billion eyes,

 

not struggling with the single heartbeat

 

that is my life.