Four Poems by
Harrison Fisher
“I Fought Once Again for Dejah Thoris”
—Edgar Rice Burroughs, from A Princess of Mars
With my back against a golden throne,
I ascended my declivity
and sang out,
and sang out
with bloodthirsty sword
my undescended canticle.
The Mean of Mean Things
The first first-grade class
that petted a bunny to death
went on
in second grade
to stone some neighborhood dogs,
knock down a crossing guard,
wring the neck of a city park swan,
and thrill-kill
the crabby old dodo
of Main Street
with plastic safety scissors,
Elmer’s Glue, and oilcloth
until they were
rounded up
to face the music,
uncomely grubs all—
and I disavowed
a sunny day
misspent in my youth
carrying caterpillars
to set on a railing
and divide
clean in half
with fine string.
The Human Condition
“I’ll ramble around and describe it all.”
—Horace, Epistle I, 16
When I started reading poems for real in the late ’60s,
there were a lot of dick and cunt poems in magazines.
Women wrote these as often as men. The words
sounded harsh, genitally blunt, as if to punch their readers
into seeing that this wasn’t just sex, it was the poet’s
real emotions hanging out there, so hairy you could touch them,
and, by doing so, feel that this was the poet’s love
being so frontally described—original, raw, and instructive.
I never much liked dick and cunt poems, so I
happily report their drying up over the last fifty years.
I never much liked the word “asshole” either, and
I never used it until, finally, around the age of 40,
under the intense pressure of a world
impinging on me from every direction, I let go
of my distaste, pronounced the word aloud with the pleasure
of liberation, and, being a tireless observer of human
behavior, have barely stopped saying it since.
Zero Sum Economy
Years ago, when stores
were closed on Sundays,
there was something
not restful
but inert
at the core of that day.
Not to cause upset, but I think
I accidentally threw out
the entire repository
of human knowledge
yesterday, Sunday,
Black Sunday,
Bloody, Bldy
Sndy.
—Vexing loss, the pronation
and supination of the dawn horse.
Recomposed for the work week,
the sudden death
of my neighbor
tries to diminish me
in our once-ballyhooed
interconnectedness
that required ultimately
unlivable buy-in.
A is for A
in the literal world.
Harrison Fisher has published twelve chapbooks, pamphlets, and full-length collections of poems since 1977. The four full-length volumes are Curtains for You (1980), Blank Like Me (1980), UHFO (1982), and Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real (2000).