Posts Tagged → poem

jim harrison: i believe

now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you

 

I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake

in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,

the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,

used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,

abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,

gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls

who haven’t quite gone totally wild, river eddies, 

leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,

turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages lost in the woods,

the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands

of birds I’ve talked to all of my life, the dogs

that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow

me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,

the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see

from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling

to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.

 

Jim Harrison

he met the world in darkness and in light

 

the earth too is an ephemerid

 

Mountains,

a moment’s earth-waves

rising and hollowing; the earth

too’s an ephemerid; the stars— short-lived

as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry

in their summer, they spiral blind up space, scattered

black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s

recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf

before birth, and the gulf after death is like dated: to labor eighty

years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome, enormous repose

after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity. Surely you never

have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue

merely to the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is

called life? I fancy that silence is the thing, this noise a found

word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;

stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding

treasure says ‘Ah!’ but the treasure’s the essence;

before the man spoke it was there, and

after he has spoken he gathers it,

inexhaustible treasure.

 

Robinson Jeffers