Thirty years ago, fresh out of college and working as a bookseller in charge of the store’s poetry section, I received a package from Knopf containing a handful of publicity materials highlighting its newly revivified poetry list. In that box . . .
We’re shattered by the loss of beloved Brick contributor Jim Harrison, who died at his desk on Saturday, March 26. From the conclusion of Jim’s Eat or Die column from Brick 86, a poem:
Broom
To remember that you’re alive . . .
Driving with Dominic
in the Southern Province
We See Hints of the Circus
The tattered Hungarian tent
A man washing a trumpet
at a roadside tap
Children in the trees,
one falling
into the grip of another
— Michael Ondaatje . . .
In the sharp tundral air
at the edge of a lamp-lit lot, the history of a dog scrambles
after the history of a wolf
five feet from the side of the road.
We are surrounded by the history of things . . .
Now I remember
I wanted to talk to you
between your Selected Poems
and the punk rock music
playing on the radio
Between the blue irises and the Mexican lawn service
The skaters and the dragonflies
Do you know what . . .
Rarely, my ex would sing to me,
I don’t know what scale he used, maybe Arab,
seventeen steps to the octave, or Chinese,
five. It was microtonal a-
harmonic, its staff was of the bass clef,
but I don’t know . . .
for C. H.
I knew the afternoon was coming to a close—
and it’s all right that you weren’t there with me—
as I made out a star from my window.
But that was fine. There is no afternoon . . .
He was tired, the gloss
had gone off the day,
but there was still the dog,
pacing, appearing at his desk
in indicting silence, with that chafing
yet stoical stare—the dog drawing him
on and out into day’s dimming aftermath, . . .
The late Mr Waterton having, some time ago, expressed his opinion that ravens are gradually becoming extinct in England, I offered the few following words about my experience of these birds.
The raven in this story is a compound of . . .
The rusty stain on the pillow, the rumble of pain
in his knee, impromptus of a dream in which
he hacked his way out again and again, the dawn
fading up from the green-blue-green of the silver birch,
a flourish . . .
Lying on his back under tall trees
he is also up there. He rills into thousands of twigs and branches,
is swayed back and forth,
as if in a catapult seat outflung in slow motion.
Standing down by the jetties . . .
Introduction to “The Sealion Hunter”
Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas was a Haida speaking mythteller, born around 1851 in the Haida village of Qaysun, “Sealion Town.” It is an empty beachfront now, but it was home, in the early nineteenth . . .