The Law of the Unforeseen Read online

  Copyright © 2018, Edward Harkness

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-912887-71-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-912887-77-7

  Library of Congress Control Number

  2018938190

  Front and back cover art: Doris Harkness

  Design: Lauren Grosskopf & Ed Harkness

  Pleasure Boat Studio books are available through your favorite bookstore

  and through the following:

  SPD (Small Press Distribution) 800-869-7553

  Baker & Taylor 800-775-1100

  Ingram 615-793-5000

  amazon.com and bn.com

  and through

  PLEASURE BOAT STUDIO: A LITERARY PRESS

  www.pleasureboatstudio.com

  Seattle, Washington

  Contact Lauren Grosskopf, Publisher

  Email: [email protected]

  Also by Edward Harkness

  Saying the Necessary

  Beautiful Passing Lives

  Ice Children, a chapbook

  Syringa in Twilight, a chapbook

  Watercolor Painting of a Bamboo Rake, a chapbook

  Fiddle Wrapped in a Gunnysack, a chapbook

  The Law of the

  Unforeseen

  Poems by

  Edward Harkness

  PLEASURE BOAT STUDIO:

  A LITERARY PRESS

  CONTENTS

  Blank Page

  One: Great Apes at the Zoo

  Three Italian Prunes

  Coming to Terms with the Fact that I May Never Get the Hang of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Monday Morning Blues”

  Clearing Brush

  Catching the Vase

  America, Great Once Again

  Scene Along the Drive

  Great Apes at the Zoo

  Two: The Gods

  Ice Children of the Andes

  Icebergs Near Twillingate

  To the Woman at the March

  Honeymoon

  The Gods

  There’s Nothing Left to Say

  The House of Mystery

  “Barb’s Healing Hands”

  Three: Ash

  The Return

  The Twins

  Dahlias

  Blue Hydrangea

  Ax

  Potatoes

  My Father Mows the Lawn

  Tying a Tie

  Root Beer Float

  Newcomer

  Shell

  Immigrants

  View of Richmond Beach

  Ash

  Coffee

  Four: Presence

  The Path

  Poetry Class

  The Lesson

  Spoon

  Dear Friend

  Letter to J, Two Days After Her Death

  Pine Siskin

  Chickadees at the Feeder

  New Year’s Eve

  Presence

  Facebook

  Neighborhood Crows

  Washing Our Backs

  Five: Airborne

  Swing

  Meadowlark

  Bat in Daylight

  The Unfocused Eyes of Drones

  Whitman Reading by Moonlight

  Airborne

  Girls Jumping Rope

  Six: Union Creek in Winter

  Union Creek in Winter

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Linda, Devin and Ned Harkness,

  for my mother, Doris Harkness,

  and in memory my father, Harry Harkness (1925-2010)

  BLANK PAGE

  Face it. You’re locked in a barless cage.

  Each way out goes back in,

  like a Möbius strip or Escher staircase.

  It’s only paper, after all, a planless

  floor plan, a plane not quite spatial,

  not exactly a hotel room in Rome

  where something surprising might occur—

  a meeting, say, with a tour guide

  who will explain in the lilting music

  of an Italian accent your itinerary

  through the city’s ancient streets.

  She’ll point out ruins, bazaars along the Tiber,

  lovers at night dangling their ankles

  in Trevi Fountain, and then treat you

  to a glass of local red at a table

  in Campo de’ Fiori, there to hear

  the bells from distant St. Peter’s,

  to watch the throngs of tourists,

  to study the night sky. Far better this

  than to stand in line by yourself

  on the slippery Italian marble floor

  of the blank page, its empty cathedral

  echoing all the things you might have said

  to break the silence of your life.

  You’re not in Rome any more. You’re home,

  starting from scratch, pacing again

  the corridors of the blank page,

  imagining a chair, a table, a vase of cosmos

  inviting you to sit, to consider how small

  the universe is, how simple, how patiently

  it waits for you to add to it—whatever

  you care to add—stars, waterfalls,

  the names of those you loved, those

  you didn’t love enough. Even the blank

  page belongs on the blank page,

  always empty, always full of promise.

  One: Great Apes at the Zoo

  Oh, when they heard that Louis was dead,

  All the people, they dressed in red.

  The angels laid him away.

  ~From the song “Louis Collins,” by Mississippi John Hurt

  THREE ITALIAN PRUNES

  roll off my desk at work, and of course

  I must ponder this inconsequential event,

  as if adhering to it grants it eternal life,

  and damn, they’re bruised and bleeding now

  in my hand. I look at them as Newton did

  his famous apple, also bruised, no doubt,

  but a bruise that led to the glue of the universe,

  a world that pulls us toward its heart,

  which is good and bad, good in that

  we don’t float through life as anemones do

  in the starless deeps. Bad in that we’re magnetized,

  tethered to the three dimensions,

  always feeling about for the fourth or fifth

  key ring to the beyond. I pick a scab

  of purple prune skin from my teeth.

  In truth, there are no dimensions.

  There’s merely now, my cluttered desk

  with its pens and sandwich wrappers,

  and an 1886 edition of Berens’ Hand-Book

  of Mythology: Myths and Legends of Greece and Rome,

  in remarkably good condition considering its age,

  owned once upon a time by a young scholar.

  On the inside cover she has floridly fountain-penned

  her name, Amelia, notes she’s 17, boarding

  at something-or-other academy in Charleston.

  She likes Athene, has scrawled “Athene” here and twice

  on the secret back inside cover. Amelia has,

  I discover, underlined a passage: “Pallas-Athene,

  goddess of Wisdom and Armed Resistance....

  is the only divinity whose authority was equal

  to that of her father, Zeus himself.”

  As for the prunes, I ate them, they were delicious,

  so sweet and so cold. As for Berens, he writes

  with the clarity of the stream into which Narcissus gazed.

  As for Amelia, her secret is an open book.

  She’s fallen hard for the goddess of Wisdo
m

  and Armed Resistance, the two of them

  now married to the scintillant dust of eternity.

  ~With apologies to WC Williams and EM Behrens

  COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FACT THAT I MAY NEVER GET THE HANG OF MISSISSIPPI JOHN HURT’S “MONDAY MORNING BLUES”

  I said it and life goes on.

  It’s not just the complicated 6/8 time,

  or the continuous alternating bass.

  And it’s not the smooth-as-a-baby’s-butt

  slides from the 3rd fret to the 5th,

  and the instantaneous requirement

  of the left-hand fingers that they leap

  from the barred A-chord to the 5th fret D,

  or the two-step dance of the right thumb

  thumping the thick baritone E-string,

  or even the jump back to A and a rather

  eccentric little duet you do

  with your left pinky and ring finger

  to make an A-sharp major diminished,

  or whatever in God’s name Hurt does there

  to resolve the dissonance and settle back

  into the barred A. Nor would I say

  it’s the slurring of certain notes,

  the hammer-offs and hammer-ons

  scattered variously throughout the ragged

  bluesy but up-tempo wizardry on the 1965

  recording I have, now so scratched

  as to be almost unplayable. And it’s not as if

  my no-longer-nimble fingers

  refuse to hop and skip gymnastically

  up and down the fret board, as they once did.

  It’s the damn song—that’s what trips me.

  It’s the blues of Monday morning,

  you feel around for your shoes—gone—

  and you realize you’re in jail,

  you don’t know why, nobody does—

  in jail, you realize, for six long weeks today,

  so goes the song. Tomorrow’s your trial day.

  What might be my fine, you’re wondering.

  Can’t be too much, can it?

  Then the trial, you’ve played the song

  over and over, nobody cares how many hours

  you’ve put in, you yourself don’t care,

  you just like to play, but the jury says guilty,

  the judge says Get a pick and shovel,

  let’s go down in the mine. That’s the only time,

  that’s the only time, that’s the only time,

  you ever felt like crying. Mister,

  change a dollar and give me a lucky dime.

  Jail or mine—there’s no escape, none,

  except by playing again and again

  Hurt’s simple, wickedly difficult tune

  with your forever tender fingertips

  raw from pressing the steel wires—

  except by singing your way,

  no matter how badly,

  through the secret air duct of music.

  CLEARING BRUSH

  I’d fallen asleep in the snow. Waking,

  a thin coverlet slid off my poncho.

  There lay the handle of my machete,

  long as my forearm, its dented blue blade

  already stained with rust, blade and forearm

  put to the test that winter to clear brush.

  I rose and re-entered my sodden life,

  the one I’d just left, the one on a bluff

  above the beach where on clear days you’d see

  the blue Olympic Range across the Sound.

  If the tide was slack, the Sound flat as glass,

  you’d see, far out, the dark backs of orcas

  rise and fall, the blades of their dorsal fins

  knifing through the swells. No clear view that day.

  No mountains. All horizons hemmed by snow,

  a wet smattering on the boughs of firs

  and alders along the cliff

  of seldom-visited Alder Park.

  Our job: to whack scotch broom, a buck an hour,

  paid in cash by a cadaverous park

  supervisor, Basil, who never spoke,

  merely nodded and appeared not to breathe.

  My workmate, Walter—aka “Waltzer”—

  McCann, claimed title to a Cadillac,

  a decrepit thing, once green, now the grey

  of waste-water. An oily knotted rope

  held the passenger door forever closed.

  No window. In the predawn he’d honk twice,

  beckon me to crawl in, a 5-minute

  endeavor, lunch bucket first, then to hunch

  on a mush of newspapers that did not

  well cover the seat springs. He’d creep

  the long way to the park, as if giving

  a guided tour of cheap motels, car lots,

  mini-marts along Aurora, always

  taking the detour to pass Golden View

  Cemetery, rolling down his window

  to call out “Good morning, darling”

  to Delores, his wife, asleep among maples.

  Six hours a day we’d swing our machetes,

  the blades ringing when they bit the wrist-sized

  trunks of broom and dogwood. By March,

  we’d slashed and piled a mountain of brush

  just as snow began to fall, lacing our ugly heap

  into a thing of delicate beauty.

  After lunch, shoulder squealing, I lay next

  to the pile, using a red bandanna to shield

  my eyes from the pricks of wet snow.

  The nap was a white cradle of silence,

  broken by the Cadillac’s throaty growl.

  I never understood why we were there,

  Waltzer and me, clearing the bluff of brush.

  Brushing off my poncho, blinking away

  the icy splats, all I knew is that I’d been reborn—

  not into the radiance of paradise,

  but close enough—a white newness

  to everything, a cloud of blue exhaust,

  a furious choir of sparrows from within our pile,

  and the rattling emphysemic rasp of Waltzer McCann

  calling to me to clamber through the window,

  asking would I be so kind as to spot him a Big Mac,

  large fries and Diet Coke on the way home.

  CATCHING THE VASE

  Twice now, reaching for something—a light switch

  that first time—you’ve caught the ceramic

  Chinese vase before it went to pieces. This morning,

  your sleeve snagged the lid stem just enough

  to cause the vase to teeter and topple

  off the end table. You dove in a way

  you didn’t know your body could move

  except during sex. Your heart became

  an instant rose, your head struck the edge

  of the table, your foot kicked out like a third

  hand clawing at the throat of death, caught the vase

  soccer-style with a socked instep and held it

  for the quarter-second your hands needed

  to make the grab. You averted that disaster,

  bandaged your forehead and noticed once again

  the three goats painted on the urn’s globed face—

  one white, one black, one brown—all three browsing

  beneath a leafy tree. You always thought the urn

  an ungainly melon, hardly pristine,

  its rim chipped, the lid broken and repaired—

  less antiquity and more thrift store—

  very likely a water jar, neither rare

  nor old, or, that is, not old for the broad river

  of Chinese history, or the broader river

  of its pottery. Late Qing Dynasty, maybe,

  early eighteen hundred-something, bought

  on the cheap at a “ghost market” in Tianjin.

  Still, you love those ugly goats, the misshapen tree,

  and the plum-colored sun
perched oddly

  in one of its limbs. You saved the day this time.

  The third time, all charms will end. The goats

  will turn to shards on the hardwood floor.

  You picture yourself sweeping, grieving,

  sifting the remains into a trash bag.

  Your eyes lie, seeing things not there, not seeing

  things that are, not seeing the goats as homely,

  funny, frolicking like real goats,

  not seeing the plum sun as precisely placed

  by the artisan, not seeing the scarred

  lopsided tree as a Daoist poke

  at Confucian harmony, and only now

  seeing for the first time the stream

  sluicing down a hinted-at hill from behind

  and to the right of the tree, curlicues of water

  curling over hinted-at rocks in calm blue curves.

  The stream has no source. The black goat,

  leaf in mouth, studies you with an animal’s bland

  curiosity. There’ll be no third lucky catch. One day,

  you—or someone—will dive and miss. You love

  the goats because they’re there, because the plum sun

  climbs the limb forever, or at least for now.

  AMERICA, GREAT ONCE AGAIN

  Riot cops have slammed the woman with green streaks

  in her dark hair onto the airport’s marble floor.

  I count eight from the posted video, whose eye peeks

  blinking between protesters near a glass door.

  She sobs, cries out, “Stop! You’re hurting me!”

  The eye moves to show a girl’s head. She’s ten,

  I’d guess. Cornrows, hands over ears—that’s all I see,

  all I need to see, must always see—men

  in body armor, one boot on the woman’s back,

  one on her neck, while others tie her wrists,

  twisting them till she shrieks, her body slack

  from writhing against what it resists.

  The recorder, as her video blurs and ends,

  whispers in her phone, We’re so fucked, my friends.