#jim harrison

[funeral]

Jim Harrison, "Sequence"

[apoemaday]

Barking

by Jim Harrison

The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

I used to tell students…the difference between poetry and you is you look in the mirror and say, “I am getting old,” but Shakespeare looks in the mirror and says, “Devouring Time, blunt thou thy lion’s paws.” —Jim Harrison

[Poetic Outlaws]

[sonandheirofnothinginparticular]

[adaptationsdaily]

I followed all of the rules, man's and God's. And you, you followed none of them. And they all loved you more. Samuel, Father, and my... even my own wife.

LEGENDS OF THE FALL (1994) dir. Edward Zwick

[agirlnamedbone]

[in-love-with-movies]

Legends of the Fall (1994)

[dk-thrive]

In each of my cells Dad and Mom are still doing their jobs. As always, Dad says yes, Mom no. I split the difference and feel deep sympathy for my children.

— Jim Harrison, in Braided Creek, A Conversation in Poetry, with Ted Kooser, Copper Canyon Press, 2003

[lillyli-74]

The gods exiled me into this loneliness for their own good reasons.

~Jim Harrison

[neo-somaliana]

What is it the wind has lost that she keeps looking for under each leaf?

— Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

[litverve]

“Death steals everything except our stories.”

Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

[fcb4]

Death Again by the late Jim Harrison

Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.

Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.

We must think of it as cooking breakfast,

it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl

or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin

after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,

slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard

to accept your last kiss, your last drink,

your last meal about which the condemned

can be quite particular as if there could be

a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers

sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid

lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon

call, and staring into the still, opaque water.

We’ll know as children again all that we are

destined to know, that the water is cold

and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far

[apoemaday]

Water

by Jim Harrison

Before I was born I was water. I thought of this sitting on a blue chair surrounded by pink, red, white   hollyhocks in the yard in front of my green studio. There are conclusions to be drawn but I can’t do it anymore.   Born man, child man, singing man,   dancing man, loving man, old man, dying man. This is a round river   and we are her fish who become water.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Photo Credit: Michael Friberg

* * * *

WOLVES OF HEAVEN

It had been very hot for three weeks so I worked well into a cool night when at three a.m. a big thunderstorm hit. I went out in the yard naked and sat at the picnic table for a rain bath careful about the rattlesnake on the sidewalk. The sky drowned the mosquitoes feeding on me. The lightning was relentless and lit up the valley so I could see the ghosts who had me ill this past year. Then I was part of a battle from two hundred years ago when the Cheyenne from the east attacked the Absaroka, the Crow, in this valley. A group of the Cheyenne were massaum, the wolves of heaven, warriors who painted themselves solid yellow. One on a black horse stopped at our gate but decided not to kill me. I want to be a yellow wolf of heaven. They disappeared into the lightning.

DEAD MAN'S FLOAT, Copper Canyon Press, 2016. JIM HARRISON: COMPLETE POEMS, Copper Canyon Press, 2021

Jim Harrison author page

[gravity-rainbow]

Horses by Jim Harrison

In truth I am puzzled most in life by nine horses.

I’ve been watching them for eleven weeks in a pasture near Melrose.

Two are on one side of the fence and seven on the other side.

They stare at one another from the same places hours and hours each day.

This is another unanswerable question to haunt us with the ordinary.

They have to be talking to one another in a language without a voice.

Maybe they are speaking the wordless talk of lovers, sullen, melancholy, jubilant.

Linguists say that language comes after music and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech to order our days.

We live far out in the country where I hear creature voices night and day.

Like us they are talking about their lives on this brief visit to earth.

In truth each day is a universe in which we are tangled in the light of stars.

Stop a moment. Think about these horses in their sweet-smelling silence.

“Horses” by Jim Harrison from Songs of Unreason. © Copper Canyon Press, 2011.

[90smovies]