Harrison Fisher

The Reclamation of Backsliders

And I have long since ceased to argue
with stasis. Why be known now?
The energy is gone.

In “The Reclamation of Backsliders,”
I opened my heart and took back all of you.
I found something False

for your lives to cohere around,
men and women without qualities,
or refulgent with wrong ones.

I peeled away your masks of shit
to take you through get well
all the way to get happy,

as, trapped in real time
in the heavens,
Columbus,

well over the edge,
holds his ships steady
for the Dog Star—

by now,
as large
as our sun.

 

Mercenary Charity

Your travels aren’t interesting.
Your daily doings aren’t interesting.
Your interests aren’t interesting.

Your family isn’t interesting, but you know that.
Your schooling isn’t interesting.
Your sex stuff isn’t interesting.
Your identity isn’t interesting, nor is your secret identity.

Your thoughts are not interesting.
Your reasons for being are not interesting.
Your dreams are not interesting, nor anyone’s.
Your friends and acquaintances are not interesting,
but you know that.

Your greatest love, the one above all others,
the one who once moved or still moves you
through hallowed space and sweet time
in rhythms you never found before or since
is, impossible to believe, not interesting.
So live your life and know these things.

 

Disporting

Sometimes
an overeager acquaintance
will congratulate me bar-side
on wearing a nice “sports jacket,”

which prompts me to bring
the ceiling down on his head:
“Do you see N Y GIANTS emblazoned
on the back of this jacket?  No?

Then it’s not a sports jacket.
It’s a sport coat, also called a ‘jacket,’
an item once required for seating
in many restaurants of yesteryear,

as long as you understand by jacket
I surely don’t mean
that thing with a hood being worn by
that thing with a hook at the end of the bar.”

 

Harrison Fisher published twelve collections of poems from 1977 to 2000, then went on hiatus from writing poems and publishing for the next 22 years.  Since 2022, he has published new poems in about 25 magazines, including BlazeVOX, Bombfire, Book XI, and Bullshit
Anthology 02.