Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, AMERICAN GIRL, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

AMERICAN GIRL, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Not a new poem for helen
Last Line: A green flower from a green stem.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Desire; Exorcism; Helen Of Troy; Mythology; Mythology - Classical; Singing & Singers; Songs


I

Not a new poem for Helen,
if they were heaped...
but she never wanted a poem,
she whose affections the moment aimed.
And not to sing a new Helen into being
with t'adores, anachronistic gymnastics,
to be diligent in praise of her
only to be struck down by her.
Sing then, if song,
after bitter retreat,
on your knees,
as anyone who would love.
My senses led me here
and I had no wit to do otherwise.
Who breathes. Has looked upon. Alone.
In the darkness. Remembers.

̺ ̺ ̺

Better to sit as a boy did in a still
cool attic in fall, tomatoes left to ripen
in autumn light on newspapers,
sucking his honeyed thumb, the forbidden
magazine across the lap and only
the mind's own nakedness for company;
the lovely photo, almost damp,
as supple and pink to the eye,
a hot country of body
but unknown and distant,
perhaps futureless.

̺ ̺ ̺

A child once thought the dead were buried
to bear children: in the morning from his loft
in the fumes of wood smoke and bacon
he watches them dress, their bathing suits drying
by the stove. The water will fill them up.

II

He dreams of Egypt in Sunday School,
the maidens of Ur-of-Chaldea, Bathsheba bathing
on her rooftop, the young virgin brought
to David to warm his hollow bones. And the horror
of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's frenzy
with his daughters; women railed against
in Habakkuk and Jeremiah, Isaiah's feverish
wife and Christ and the woman at the well --
to look in lust is to do without doing;
eyes follow the teacher's rump as she leaves the room.

̺ ̺ ̺

At sixteen his first whore, youngish
and acrid, sharing with her a yellow room
and a fifth of blackberry brandy;
first frightened with only his shoes on,
then calmed, then pleased, speechlessly
preening and arrogant. They became
blackberry brandy but never sweetly again --
vile in Laramie before dawn through
a darkened bar and up the long backstairs,
on Commerce St. in Grand Rapids shrieking
with gin. He craved some distant cousin
in Sweden he'd never seen, incestuously,
in some flower-strewn woods near the water.

̺ ̺ ̺

After a New Year's and his first French meal,
enchantee of course pursing her thick lips,
throwing one leg over the other
in the abandonment of sitting down,
throwing off room-length heat beneath layers
of nylon, stuffed with turbot and filet as she is,
splendidly in health, though her only apparent
exercise is screwing, "making the love,"
not gentle-like but as a Mack truck
noses a loading platform.

III

The same "she" seen from a bus
or store window, often too young,
across the subway tracks in pure ozone,
the blond cheerleader with legs
bared to hundreds of eyes.
Always a fool before the coins --
I Ching forcing turmoil, the cauldron.
The fool has eyes and touch,
is mammalian. He lacks all odds,
ruts then is scathed. There's Helen
in a Greek nightclub, a hundred
years old and selling pistachios,
half a century away from any bed --
her face a shucked pecan.

̺ ̺ ̺

Near the shore in a bed of reeds
he finally sees her for a moment,
the moon their only witness,
a single white eye;
her face is swirling in the dark,
changing faces a thousand times
then slipping back into black water.

̺ ̺ ̺

But they are confections, put-together things
who will not stay in or go out but pause
on the edge of a room or wherever they are,
uncertain of what they are or whether they care.
So are they praised for what they aren't, young,
and blamed for what they haven't, a wilderness
of blood; pitiful creatures, calcined, watery,
with airbrushed bodies and brains.

̺ ̺ ̺

I write this out of hard silence
to be rid of it. Not, as once, in love,
chin on breastbone as if the head
by its own dull weight would snap,
a green flower from a green stem.





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