Jim Harrison's "Apology"

Thoughts on gratitude.

Apology

I don't weigh an hour
in consecutive breaths—
my sleeves are short,
my elbows reveal thin wires
attached to a skull
that rattles when it wants
to sing; but sometimes
when a good rain falls
and there is heat enough
some fine clean grass
even flowers
grow up through the weeds
in this boneyard.


from Jim Harrison: Complete Poems (Copper Canyon, 2021)

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In one of the more monumental feats of my life, I borrowed the massive tome that is Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems from the library about two weeks ago, and I have been carrying it with me nearly everywhere I go.

I think, perhaps because of its size, that I am one of the first — if not the actual first — people to have checked out this book from the New York Public Library, with its 92 locations spread out across this vast city of nearly eight and a half million people. I say that not just because of the sound the book made when I creaked it open, which is the same sound my back makes at odd intervals of the day, which is also the same sound a wooden floorboard makes at night when you are twelve years old and trying, barefoot, to sneak downstairs without waking your father, but also because of the fact that there was not a hint of love left lingering in the book when I first cracked it open. And when I say love, I mean — and I do mean this — the faint echo of a dog-ear, an affection I offer a book because I love what the book has to offer on that specific page. Or, I mean the half-erased outline of a pencil scribble (which, though I don’t partake in such a thing when I borrow a book, is a thing I still find endearing and acceptable, given the impermanent marker of such a permanent love). And it is hard for me to believe that someone with a beating heart could make it through nearly one thousand pages of Jim Harrison poems without saying no, wait, let me write that down, or no, wait, let me fold the corner of that one, so that I can return to it later.

When I do finally return this testament of and to poetry, it will be with little markers and echoes and ghosts of my love. A hundred pages folded in the corner, and then unfolded, leaving a crease. That crease: a reminder to someone with a beating heart that something they are holding now was held and loved by someone else with a beating heart.

I say all that to introduce the fact that I was torn about what poem to write about today. I was torn between two poems. The first was today’s poem, “Apology,” which is from Jim Harrison’s first book, Plain Song, published in 1965. And the second was a poem, “Zona,” published in 2016, just over fifty years after Plain Song, in a book titled Dead Man’s Float. Here is that poem, in full:

My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me—
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.

Please excuse not the content of what I am about to say, but perhaps the intensity of how I say it. Come! The! Fuck! On! Read this poem, “Zona,” again, and then read today’s poem. Then read both again, one more time. And again, again.

You might notice a few things. You might notice that one syntactical difference, how “Apology” spans a single sentence, while “Zona” moves with seemingly deliberate terseness, a smattering of short sentences. You might notice the brevity of both, but perhaps, too, the startling brevity of “Zona.” But, other than that, you might have the revelation that I had, sitting on the 1 Train, journeying south from a high school track meet at Van Cortlandt. A revelation that might go like holy fuck, isn’t this the same poem as the one from so much earlier? A revelation that asks: aren’t these poems in such a kind of quiet conversation with one another? Aren’t these poems little echoes of big things, spoken through time? And written decades apart, over half a century apart, by the same person — what of that? Isn’t there something beautiful about that?

I think I have been thinking of these two poems, sitting as they do on opposite ends of Harrison’s complete book of poems, because of the way that so much changes — in Harrison’s work, in Harrison’s life, in our own work, in our own lives — in between these poems, and because of the way that, even amidst that change that spans a life, something else doesn’t seem to change. Something stays true and intrinsic. Because yes, both of these poems are saying something similar, aren’t they? Aren’t they saying something difficult about having a body? About having a skull that rattles when it wants to sing? Aren’t they saying something difficult about dealing with time, which rushes toward us, with no brakes? And aren’t they saying something with that phrase but sometimes, with that word still? As in: despite the pains of this fragile thing we call a body, and despite the relentless ceaselessness of time, there is still something worth cherishing in us and in our experience of being here right now, in this time, with our bodies and all those others who have bodies and all those things that grow between us and among us — the flowers in the garden, the radishes we butter and salt.¹

This turning, embodied in the phrase but sometimes, or the phrase and yet, or the phrase even so, or the word still, is part of an act that I might simply call gratitude. And that act is not an act in the sense of how the word act can mean something like falsehood. No, that act is an act in the sense of how the word act can mean something like action. Gratitude is a conscious action, made all the more conscious and deliberate in the midst of a situation — such as living in a fragile, limited body in a fragile, limited world — that makes it harder to choose to enact such an action. In her play, Sweat, Lynn Nottage writes of the “fractured togetherness” that is this world. There is perhaps no better way I’ve heard to describe a body, or a relationship, or a community, or a society. It is in that same “fractured togetherness” where “even flowers / grow up through the weeds.” It is in that same “fractured togetherness” where gratitude becomes a deliberate choice, the flower you make of yourself even when it feels hard to make or acknowledge beauty.

These poems today are about gratitude, aren’t they? And the world makes that turn towards gratitude (which both poems enact) hard, not just because the world — rife as it currently is with genocide, misinformation, hypocrisy, the corruption that power creates, and the power created by such corruption — is hard, but also because, in such moments when the world is hard, which is all of the time, gratitude feels almost like a fool’s game, or a privileged person’s game, or just, well, a game — nothing substantive. Not worth the time or the attention — attention that might feel better offered to better things. I think of how, in Kaveh Akbar’s novel, Martyr!, which I just read, his protagonist, Cyrus Shams, gives voice to that notion:

Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse.

And yet — gratitude and grace share the same origin. Later in the novel, a different conclusion of gratitude — if you consider it a cousin of grace, or even a brother, or even a sister — is offered:

What distinguishes grace from anything else? Grace is unearned.

Here, an echo of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

And, finally, to put a finer point on it, here’s Ross Gay:

Noticing what we love in common…might help us survive.

Gratitude, like grace, is important because it operates from a different internal mechanism than the dominant operating mechanism of the world. It does not consider what is earned or unearned. It does not abide by such metrics we often use to calculate value. To practice it, then — to choose to practice it — is to take a radical stance against the aspects of our world that so often cause and perpetuate harm. Notice, in today’s poems, how Harrison has to literally turn himself away from such aspects of the world — from a fixation on the body, from an idea of usefulness — and turn towards a notion of gratitude that is more expansive, that considers the garden as something more than just weeds. It is, in part, a kind of gratitude that is missing on the part of those in power when, for example, they weaponize their power against those who raise their voice. One could be grateful for such dissent. I am reminded of a social worker at my school who often tells our students how love can involve correction. That correction: a kind of care. That care: something I want to be grateful for.

As I have read through Harrison’s nearly thousand pages of poems, I have wondered if maybe that is part of the mark of his craft — his gratitude. It is that that has remained between 1965 and 2016. It has remained even as Harrison has written about so much. It’s there when he writes of the birds who are “already members of eternity.” And it’s there when he writes, in his poem “Friends,” of dogs:

Dogs, departed companions,
I told you that the sky would fall in
and it did. How will we see each other again
when we're without eyes? We'll figure it out
as we used to when you led me back
to the cabin in the forest in the dark.

It’s there, too, in his acknowledgment of helplessness — from one of his last poems:

The brain is helpless
which is fine.

And it’s there at the end of that same poem, when the birds come back, just like flowers, and just like radishes:

Our lives aren’t good but passable,
our mortgages and cancer loom. But birds
lead us outside where we belong.

It might not seem like gratitude, but it is, I think. It is the act of seeing, as Harrison writes in another poem, the “beauty in this the darkest music.”

And so: for such gratitude, I am grateful. I don’t know where — or who — I would be without it. I am learning that it can be the quiet thing — like tenderness — that buoys up a life. The quiet thing that considers possibility. The quiet thing that resists easy definition, which is so often the kind of definition offered by those in power. In a note from one of his books, Harrison writes the following:

To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime.

If part of the thing you are trying to say has something to do with grace, or gratitude, you probably have to shape and reshape and make and remake that pen each day, if only because the world might try — without your asking — to undo the work of gratitude you are trying to make possible on the page, and in your life. And so yes — for better, and certainly not for worse, never for worse — this work of gratitude is the work of a lifetime.

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Some notes:

1. If you are in NYC and want to come by, I am reading at Housing Works this Wednesday as part of the 15th anniversary celebration of Longreads. Details are here. It says the event is sold out, but I don’t believe that…you should still come through!

2. I continue to follow this page (and this one, of the NYC chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, and now this one, of the Palestinian Youth Movement) to see the ongoing developments of ways to stand in solidarity with those in Gaza.

3. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.

1. A footnote for you. As I was writing this essay — the act of which began briefly on Thursday, more substantially on Friday, and then with even more vigor on Saturday — I walked through the Union Square Greenmarket. It was early Saturday afternoon, and I was sort of stalling for time, in between things, and I wanted to get my wife one of those carrot cookies this one stand sells (they are big and huge and basically like the top of the biggest muffin you’ve ever or never seen), and I wanted to see if there was any bread from She Wolf (the best bakery in the city) (and, sadly, there wasn’t). And I was also, as I often do when I haven’t finished one of these essays, thinking about what I might write about. Which is to say: I was thinking of radishes. I really was! Truly. I was thinking of radishes. And then — fucking boom. A billion radishes, magenta-bright, shining through a bundle of green. Two dollars a bunch. I bought a bunch. Which is to say: I bought a handful. I felt like a king. Two dollars for these things I was thinking of! These things for which I had a recipe, the simplest one! Butter and salt. And so I did just that. I got home, washed my radishes, sliced them, and warmed up a big old pat of butter, which I spread on a fresh little guy that I then sprinkled with salt. It was great. Crisp and savory. The radishes are good this year, I’m telling you. Run them through butter. Add a little salt.