this morning I felt strong and jaunty

a buddha was born

 

This morning

I felt strong and jaunty in my

mail order Israeli commando trousers.

Up at Hard Luck Ranch I spoke to the ravens

in baritone, fed the cats with manly gestures.

Acacia thorns can’t penetrate these mighty pants,

then out by the corral the infant pup began

to weep, abandoned. In an instant

I became another of the

Earth’s billion sad

mothers.

 

Jim Harrison

all are worthy

 

men raise children on trivialities

galadriel thompson

 

It certainly wasn’t

fish who discovered water or

birds the air. Men built houses in part

out of embarrassment by the stars and raised

their children on trivialities because they had butchered

the god within themselves. The politician standing on

the church steps thrives within the grandeur

of this stupidity, a burnt out lamp

who never imagined

the sun.

 

Jim Harrison

the complete poems

sieze the day gently

 

darkness is always there

natalia jakubek

 

I have studied

and become intimate with

 the speed of darkness. It’s so fast it’s

always here. When the light withdraws

the dark comes from no place. It always lives

with us. Your heart and brain are black.

They never see the true light except in violence

or autopsy. Of course the brain can cast

its own blinding light that we wait for in a poem,

at least blinding to us. In our trances the loves

of long ago enter the room unescorted, silent

perhaps from the black bottom of the ocean

where we all die in perfect darkness, a sense

of whirling that recedes back to the time

the ocean swallowed the smallest stars

then heated us into our early life.

Darkness is always there,

it only stands

revealed.

 

Jim Harrison

 

sieze the day gently

jim harirson dog river

 

We

drove her aqua

Ford convertible into the country

with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect day

with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves into

the future together seizing the day. Fifty years later we hold each

other looking out the windows at birds, making dinner, a life

to live day after day, a life of dogs and children and the

far wide country out by rivers, rumpled by

mountains. So far the days keep

coming. Seize the day gently

as if you loved

her.

 

Jim Harrison

dead man’s float