| Invasive
by Jim Harrison
Coming out of anesthesia I believed
I had awakened in the wrong body,
and when I returned to my snazzy hotel room
and looked at Architectural Digest
I no longer recognized large parts of the world.
There was a cabin for sale
for seven million dollars, while mine had cost
only forty grand with forty acres. An android
from drugs I understood finally that life
works to no one’s advantage. From dawn
until midnight I put together a jigsaw puzzle
made of ten million pieces of white confetti.
On television I watch the overburdened world
of books and movies, all flickering trash, while outside
cars pass through deep puddles on the street,
the swish and swash of life, patterns of rain
drizzle on the windows, finch yodel and Mexican raven squawk
until I enter the murder of sleep and fresh demons,
one of whom sings in basso profundo Mickey and Sylvia’s
“Love is Strange.” In the bathroom mirror it’s someone else.
Jim Harrison, "Invasive" from Complete Poems. Copyright © 2021 by the Estate of Jim Harrison. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org (buy now) Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out. It started with “Haunted Happenings” in the 1980s, a celebration that took place over a single weekend. But more and more happenings were added to the events calendar every year until they filled the entire month of October and now a quarter of a million tourists flock to Salem to celebrate the monthlong Festival of the Dead. There’s a psychic fair and witchcraft expo every day. Psychic mediums deliver messages from departed loved ones — or an expert can teach you how to communicate with the dead on your own. Witch doctors and hoodoo practitioners explain the art of graveyard conjuring. There are séances and cemetery tours. You can solemnly honor your lost loved ones at the Dumb Supper, a feast with the dead. And the whole thing culminates with The Official Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball at the historic Hawthorne Hotel. Salem has had a complicated relationship with witches ever since the infamous witch trials of 1692. Over the course of a year nearly 200 residents of Essex County were falsely accused of witchcraft; 19 people were hanged and one man was tortured to death. For generations after the trials the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village just wanted to put the tragedy behind them — so much so that Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. But some modern-day pagans and Wicca practitioners have turned Salem into a pilgrimage site so the city ironically, and somewhat uneasily, has made witchcraft part of its marketing strategy. Author J.W. Ocker wrote about this phenomenon in A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016). He says: “The Witches, capital W, religious Witches, they balk a little bit at the Halloween witch, because it’s ugly and it’s a stereotype, and it has all these historical associations with it. Then there are people like the historians who balk at the religious witches, who kind of co-opt the cause of the accused witches by saying that they were almost martyrs for the cause. Then there’s the city trying to make everyone happy.” It’s the birthday of Natalie Barney (books by this author), an American writer born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876. The granddaughter of a wealthy rail car manufacturer, she learned French from a governess who read Jules Verne aloud so that she would have to pick up the language to follow the story. Her father died when she was in her twenties, leaving her an extravagant inheritance that she used to decamp to Paris. She was famous for holding Friday “salons” at her home in the Latin Quarter at which writers and artists would gather, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Elliot. Barney lived openly as a lesbian, Paris being a safe harbor, and she became known for her scorn for monogamy and her many love affairs. Barney published five volumes of poetry, three memoirs, two books of essays, one novel, and three volumes of epigram, including “Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction,” and “How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue,” and “Fatalism is the lazy man’s way of accepting the inevitable,” and “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.” Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 