Freeways & Aqueducts
by Renee
James Harms, Freeways and Aqueducts. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004. US$13.95 paper (ISBN 0-88748-404-2), 87 pages.
James Harms is the author of three earlier books of poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press: Quarters, The Joy Addict, and Modern Ocean, all of which are filled with thoughtful, well-crafted poems. In his most recent effort, Freeways and Aqueducts, Harms produces poems of such emotional resilience that they are a true delight to read and re-read. Harms creates an intimacy through the tender dialogue between real human events and emotional insights tinged with sorrow and contemplation, a perfect pitch between a prayer and a confession, that which is visceral and that which is intuitive.
The moments depicted in Harms’ poems are often deceptively ordinary; he draws us into the terrain of the heart by means of everyday experience. In “Loves Leaves More Than Flowers,” Harms’ narration mirrors the exploration of a backyard by little Annemarie, a childlike innocence and her pronouncement that God, in fact, does love leaves more than flowers. There is a wonderful small truth in the love of the common leaf over the ornate flower. It is a child’s observation with the heart of an adult struggling, quietly:
“I listen to pigeons in the almond trees, the rustle
Of wings or wind sorting through the blossoms,
My voice like a bit of dust falling with sunlight,
Something or someone looking for leaves.”
The child inspires this inner reverie, which is touched and influenced by the subtle nuances of the environment around him. There is a quiet sense of loss, the kind that one can’t easily explain but understands as a loss all the same, that “bit of dust falling.”
Harms returns to that childlike innocence coupled with an adult need for understanding in “California Stars in West Virginia (For Walt).” Here, the environment is also threaded through the poem, but in this case it is two distinct places, blossoms falling in a bassinet in California and the stars in the night sky of West Virginia. The melding of the two environments also meshes the past with the present. The moon becomes “a white hole in the aqueduct” the moon being from West Virginia and the aqueduct from California. It is physical details that become metaphysical, “stars/freckling irrigation puddles.” These separate worlds blend together to create an intimate moment between a father and a son, the past and the present, the poet and the reader.
Many poems in this collection have the same sense of irony displayed in Harms’ earlier books. “Copernicus” is an example of this kind of poem. Set in a waiting room in San Francisco, the poem explores the “sudden friendship” of two people visiting fathers in need of medical care. He takes an otherwise random conversation and stands it on its ear when he reveals, “And then, /like a severed head, sincerity made its appearance, /scaring the hell out of both of us.” The two begin to share more personal details of their situation, almost against their will but not quite. They share with each other, as well as the reader, as fog rolls in from the bay outside. Again, environment plays a key role in setting the emotional tenor, but unlike other poems where the environmental aspects mirror the innocence of a child, here it heightens the adult feelings of fear and loss:
“…I imagined the clouds
stiffening like egg whites, a confectioner’s dream
creeping slowly towards the city. And how do we measurethe world, I thought, with what we see or what we know
is there? “Another beer please,” she said, “and some nuts.”
Harms uses the interplay of internal thought and external speech to create the tension of the moment. Using the image of the confectioner’s egg whites against the action of creeping clouds also create tension. Internally, there is the philosophical question of what can we trust – can we trust what we feel or know? Externally there is the question of making sense of what we see from the outside world. The idea of trust – trusting a stranger or oneself — is central to this poem, and resonates with the ironic ending. The narrator, telling his sister about his “sudden friendship” in the Copernicus room is corrected to its “real” name, Carnelian room, “…as if that is what mattered –/as if that is what I needed to get right – was where I’d been.”
“Copernicus” is an important poem to this collection thematically because of this idea of “what to get right.” Harms struggles, and the reader with him, through these poems to understand and intuit what to get from his surroundings and relationships, the deeper and often hidden meanings. This searching is also prevalent in “The Episcopal Minister” a poem where Harms gives us the ending of a long day in the life of his father. The father, returning from his work of visiting the retired and the sick, tending to his flock, so to speak, comes home to a dark house, sleeping children and wife upstairs, and “a few glasses/of burgundy, alone in the darkness.” There is a haunting sense in this poem, that the father sacrifices his own family for the needs of his parishioners, and yet Harms conveys this not in a sense of bitterness, but in a sympathetic way, as if his father’s cold dinner alone is something that we all struggle with, at odds with feelings of duty and of loneliness. Far from admonishing his father, Harms gives us a closer and tender look, with simple yet intimate details: a note pinned to the placemat from his mother, the family collie coming down for the scraps of his father’s refrigerated spaghetti. There is a sense of sadness and longing in the final lines, where the father recognizes the dog with a simple and familiar, “Good boy.” The dog, finally, is his only companion in the dark night after a long day of ministering to others.
These poems are just a few examples of the array of emotions and situations that Harms explores in Freeways and Aqueducts. While the tone of each shifts from innocence to loss, questioning and uncertainty to slippery truths and quiet understanding, Harms writes these moments in true and honest ways that resonate and connect us to them. As readers, we can’t help but be taken in with closeness that Harms shares with us in these poems and we admire them because we aren’t let off the hook, there aren’t easy answers. He gives us the mysterious in the ordinary, the remarkable in the environment around us and sympathy in trying to understand that which eludes us. His perceptions are those which we wish we were apt enough to express ourselves. Perhaps they are all the better for Harms’ subtle, poignant words, which gives shape to the flux of a complex world.