Dead Man's Float. Jim Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ I’ll take him there someday. And best of all a stump in a gully that I can crawl into and sit up. My place of grace on earth, my only church. The gods live there.

      How to get out of this hospital? I planned three departures but a doctor won’t sign my release. I am desperate for home and my lovely wife. They want to keep me here though departure is supposedly voluntary. Finally a friend in California sent a jet and saved me. We loaded up my daughter, my secretary, and her daughter and were soaring back to Montana.

      A green glade of soft marsh grass near a pool in a creek. There are a dozen white birches and I curl in the grass. The last day I saw a drop of blood on a tile. Be careful, our blood falls easily.

Birds

      The birds are flying around frantically

      in the thunderstorm that just began, the

      first in weeks and weeks. They are enjoying

      themselves. I think I’ll join them.

Solstice Litany

      1

      The Saturday morning meadowlark

      came in from high up

      with her song gliding into tall grass

      still singing. How I’d like

      to glide around singing in the summer

      then to go south to where I already was

      and find fields full of meadowlarks

      in winter. But when walking my dog

      I want four legs to keep up with her

      as she thunders down the hill at top speed

      then belly flops into the deep pond.

      Lark or dog I crave the impossible.

      I’m just human. All too human.

      2

      I was nineteen and mentally

      infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah.

      The hem of his robe was as wide

      as the horizon and his trunk and face

      were thousands of feet up in the air.

      Maybe he appeared because I had read him

      so much and opened too many ancient doors.

      I was cooking my life in a cracked clay

      pot that was leaking. I had found

      secrets I didn’t deserve to know.

      When the battle for the mind is finally

      over it’s late June, green and raining.

      3

      A violent windstorm the night before

      the solstice. The house creaked and yawned.

      I thought the morning might bring a bald earth,

      bald as a man’s bald head but not shiny.

      But dawn was fine with a few downed trees,

      the yellow rosebush splendidly intact.

      The grass was all there dotted with Black

      Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible

      except to fire but now it’s too green to burn.

      What did the cattle do in this storm?

      They stood with their butts toward the wind,

      erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular.

      I was in bed cringing at gusts,

      imagining the contents of earth all blowing

      north and piled up where the wind stopped,

      the pile sky-high. No one can climb it.

      A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened.

      4

      The sun should be a couple of million miles

      closer today. It wouldn’t hurt anything

      and anyway this cold rainy June is hard

      on me and the nesting birds. My own nest

      is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair

      of many years. The old windows don’t keep

      the weather out, the wet wind whipping

      my hair. A very old robin drops dead

      on the lawn, a first for me. Millions

      of birds die but we never see it — they like

      privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so

      I think. We can’t tell each other when we die.

      Others must carry the message to and fro.

      “He’s gone,” they’ll say. While writing an average poem

      destined to disappear among the millions of poems

      written now by mortally average poets.

      5

      Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest.

      The full moon shines in the river, there are pale

      green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm

      comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes

      a nearby tamarack bursting into flame.

      I go into the cabin feeling unworthy.

      At dawn the tree is still smoldering

      in this place the gods touched earth.

Another Country

      I love these raw moist dawns with

      a thousand birds you hear but can’t

      quite see in the mist.

      My old alien body is a foreigner

      struggling to get into another country.

      The loon call makes me shiver.

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