Randal Sean Harrison, PhD
The poems ‘Odalisque’ and ‘In Memory, M. Jackson’ (appearing here as ‘What Rises Inside You’), were first published in The Poetry Conspiracy.
And he sounds like he’s missing Some thing or someone that he knows He can't have now And if he isn't, I certainly am —Suzanne Vega, “In Liverpool”
In all that I paint you loom An exorbitant odalisque, gaunt and Unsmiling you hold to your chair As if to fly out and tear my hair Or perhaps two pears An aspect which startles When arranging them I Fall on your figure Or a blue vase and bulb Or a bean in a green bottle or cat Or couched reclining nude in Showy evening primrose softly stricken Or candle-blacked and withered wicks Or sticks to make a crucifix Or kind of nimbus in cup's fluted lip Or you are absent conspicuously so
For Shreya
What is this flowering This natured rising in me? From winter failing Such force in my every fuse Prising from black night a field of light with flower-flare singing yellow Now days of rusted root renew In apple-sweetness white In pulling mouths of nectar In Irises of opened hands This newest me sprung from Spring in you
for Eunice Gonzalez, in memory of her husband John When it was suddenly pressed upon me To make myself a space of shadow And to make a very great space between us Where before I had been like a tower All the hours of light and stone And believing myself cathedral At first refused away the voice Which was intimate and hinted at grace It meant everything to remain when my Life fell in upon me like a sea And I was crumbled and suddenly made nothing It was then I became something larger And discovered myself less a man and More a wind which stood on the waters And I listened to your wail, Its tolling made a misery bell Come down from your bell tower my love and listen And when you lay your woman's head Against a window considering, I will be the breath of the world which Presses against you through the glass
for my grandmother, Merle H. Jackson The Autumn Moon stone dead — And what rises inside you is The intimacy of the impending High off, the rain stands like the figure Of a stranger on a hill Watching a house Where none sleep In waiting for the rain I am remembering your bedpans Eaten bones and liver, Your death like an ellipsis, Like an ellipse A photograph of you in nineteen forty-nine Standing smiling outside that New York bar And that space to your left is how it had its Hands on you even then — Its hands in your pockets and to your ear whispering How this thing has happened As surely as it will I wake suddenly to rain-torn houses Sliding into the sea Out my window, the storm-stained horizon The clouds shape the soldiering dead That history never knew
for Adam Duritz A man suddenly or not so suddenly Lifts one day his eyes from the table The book and plate and his hands among them His hands which lay like fish on the table His whole life like dead fish on a table He thinks to move house move South down the coast — it's a renaissance Must be He makes a gift of the table and the plate The book he places in a small bag, Ties his shoes, fastens up his needs and his Fears in the middle and hangs them around his neck And moves south away from himself When he arrives he is new A new skin under a new sky, It seems to him, suggests a new animal In some limited sense, In the language of stripes and spots, This is true — true enough Who can deny it?
I listen to your parking lot eyes And your skin white as our Hill house near the sea Years spent in a promiseless peace Even as you lie blue against the bedframe While the darker sky reaches down into you I resist coming to you as if I were able This Monday the mail leaves you Wanting from America From America waiting for word This one more Monday and the mail Bringing no word from America But Monday-come we'll see this finished Monday-come the charm is wound I'll grow the grass and absence of my empty lot When this promise has been withdrawn America remakes her movies And her loves makes new Or abandons old hopes as we are wont to do And we prove Americans still As we wait for a sign in the sighing of wind And a slow-moving postman Rounding our hill
What is it, oh my God, to walk willing or stumble toward it — even made music — Jesus Christ! To be hanged to death by a stiff neck? Do not spindle Do not bend or fold These instructions are simple, The first we learn When first we learn to correspond Song and silence and The Goddamned wrong decision The worst most wrong decision Ever she made
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam (Emanuel de Witte) It's perfect, the dog with cocked head Considering the Madonna motif The workmen shovel and survey Like workmen always Watching the gentleman with rapier His fat eye, his wig and wide brim The workmen, the workmen — The weight of the world as Each stingy atlas sustains us So it holds that when all the days are filled up In violence and in flat accounts We'll find the workmen will Anyway shovel and survey In the interior of the Nieuwe Kerk Where what is most remarkable is the Hidden marvelous machine of the working men
When afterward he would end his workday and from the café follow the others out along the avenue until each forked away With their own tired backs and stiffening fingers Wandering down their own sounding streets Left to arrive at his own small apartment Under his left arm a small baguette Day old most likely and in his pocket a gazette The days, he would wonder, How the days had laid him out Like a boxer with quick thick fists And his sister would bring him cooked coffee And put the light out and they would sit quietly Drawing the night through their window Neither mentioning the very absence of stars
You filled me as a child Filled me to swoon like the Old men who full with wine Quietly sing, sit alone with their longing Early awakened to your breasts and hips Your lips and eyes and tied hair And the smell of your skin dusted with powder With always the tightening in the top of my throat, swallowing my Shame like stones And from your brother Dima I hid you beneath my eyes As we swam together in the evenings And when we sometimes struck senseless In hoping to know it Lay holding one another in arms Then the brown arm that held me Borrowed from the blood you shared And it conjured the stolen sight of you sleeping And now as I stand a woman grown In a street now strange to me I watch you lay your hand on The neck of your young child And my stomach fills suddenly With burning stone
I might be such water as Runs its course to you over stones Collected Sundays In light tin pails strapped fast To your stick-leg pinch-mule Carried homeward where its taste of Rock-sprung lime is the Only strange sweetness to follow The bitter of unripened apples Found afield Found falling just red not Far from your home
I would shutter tight up like a man Who'd dashed his conscience against An unspeakable and necessary act I would, like a moon refusing away The light, claim this other protection and, House in a storm, All the little waters I was proof against But when you drew me out deep I found no path home And sounding suddenly near me the dogs I see through the trees their smiling shapes That we invite the inevitable That we extend ourselves and our Opened homes to the inevitable That she not shape her magic against us Is a bald lie
We make three bodies, three wheels In a spokeless rhythm of whim And how I am the least member, a distant third Does not escape me — you've made clear You are cooled and spun, The beauty of inaction, a Glorious economy of light An amazing subtlety you have it All over him who rages brilliant bright: You are nothing without me! But I don't reach you and Nights when I find me Swaying under your call Just suddenly I rise up to shout down The song of your sweetness Which is emptiness Which is silence Which is nothing but stone
There are sounds sometimes An onomatopoeia of pain Sounds which speak to one saying Well, like a thing falling or scraping You see it’s a crash, a clash which draws our eye Perhaps the sound of rust, or how the Ringing of wind on metal sings loneliness Or when a rhythmic dripping sings the memory of nothing real, season after season after season Sometimes in cities we are sunk senseless Sunk in sound, on a bus, on a bench But waiting for a kind of alchemy Waiting to be called to see or say Still I was unsuspecting when From promised-seeming silence you broke to become at once the sudden real sound of you And I was called but struck