Harrison Fisher


Train from Penn Station to Rhinecliff

               What redemptive vision can transform the radical chaos of one wounded child’s 
               slow and agonizing death in the ahuman continuousness of a virgin forest?
							 Susan Howe

Pecksniffian Rhine-
cliffians disembark here
[line illegible]



The Headless Ostrich Race

                                                            There are the ecstatic endings 
                                                            and there are the endings that make sense.
						                                      Harvey Shapiro

Snipping ostrich heads
off starts them running, crying
kids strapped to their backs.



One Good Turn

                     Sometimes I’ll start working on an opera and it turns into a potato print.
				                                   Laurie Anderson

I command all pit
bulls to attack their owners
tonight at dinner.



Reprimand

                                             I am like a ripe shit and the world is a gigantic asshole.  We will both 
                                             probably let go of each other soon.
						       Martin Luther (as quoted by Erik Erikson)

Cooks, bacon limits
your repertoire, palate, and
imagination.



Daylight Saving Time Public Service Announcement


                              Horror privileges eyes because, more crucially than any other cinema, it is about eyes.
				                                     Carol J. Clover

Eyeballed smoke alarm.
Banal, seasonal duty.
Found battery dead.



Unfamiliarity with the World 


1
STOP signs on local roads caused me
a lot of anxiety as a child because it was not immediately apparent
when the vehicle was allowed to go again.


2
Being a youngster in Philadelphia circa 1960
didn’t seem to afford enough modern protection against earthquakes
which I saw swallow dinosaurs in a movie.


3
My father was a retail executive who worked six days a week.
I thought everybody else’s father did, too.  I didn’t realize he was at the 
horses on Saturdays, avoiding the harridan who birthed me.

Harrison Fisher received his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and held an NEA fellowship in poetry in 1978. He has published twelve collections of poems, four of them book-length: Curtains for You (1980), Blank Like Me (1980), UHFO (1982), and Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real (2000).

 
 

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