Dead Man's Float. Jim Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ at the cabin I see a book

      and am not quite sure what that is.

Zona

      My work piles up,

      I falter with disease.

      Time rushes toward me —

      it has no brakes. Still,

      the radishes are good this year.

      Run them through butter,

      add a little salt.

Seven in the Woods

      Am I as old as I am?

      Maybe not. Time is a mystery

      that can tip us upside down.

      Yesterday I was seven in the woods,

      a bandage covering my blind eye,

      in a bedroll Mother made me

      so I could sleep out in the woods

      far from people. A garter snake glided by

      without noticing me. A chickadee

      landed on my bare toe, so light

      she wasn’t believable. The night

      had been long and the treetops

      thick with a trillion stars. Who

      was I, half-blind on the forest floor

      who was I at age seven? Sixty-eight

      years later I can still inhabit that boy’s

      body without thinking of the time between.

      It is the burden of life to be many ages

      without seeing the end of time.

Easter Again

      Christ rose so long ago but the air

      he rose through hasn’t forgotten

      the slight red contrail from the wounds.

      I think he was headed

      to that galaxy with six trillion stars

      to cool off from the Crucifixion.

      I have often heard the spikes

      being driven through hands

      and feet — in my mind, that is.

      The sky was truly dark blue

      that day and earth a tiny

      green-and-blue ball.

The Present

      I’m sitting on the lip of this black hole, a well

      that descends to the center of the earth.

      With a big telescope aimed straight down

      I see a red dot of fire and hear the beast howling.

      My back is suppurating with disease,

      the heart lurches left and right,

      the brain sings its ditties.

      Everywhere blank white movies wait to be seen.

      The skylark flew within inches of the rocks

      before it stopped and rose again.

      The cost of flight is landing.

Soul

      My spirit is starving.

      How can it be fed?

      Not by pain in the predictable future

      nor the pain in the past

      but understanding the invisible flower

      within the flower that tells it what is,

      the soul of the tree that does the same.

      I don’t seem to have a true character

      to discover, a man slumped on his desk

      dozing at midmorning. I’m an old poet.

      That’s it. Period. A three-legged goat

      in mountain country. It’s easier in the woods

      where you have trees to lean on. There at times

      I smelled bears right behind the cabin

      coming to eat sunflower seeds put out for birds.

      This dawn it’s primroses, penstemon,

      the trellis of white roses. On Easter

      Jesus is Jesus. When did God enter him or us?

Thunder

      Thunder before dawn,

      thunder through dawn,

      thunder beings they were called.

      It had to be a person or animal up there.

      Outside, walking to my work shed

      the clouds were low, almost black, and turbulent.

      You could nearly jump up and touch them.

      I love thunder. I could listen to it all day long.

      Like birdsong it’s the music of the gods.

      How in childhood I adored these cloud voices

      that could lift me up above my troubles,

      far above the birds. I’d look down

      at their flying backs, always in circles

      because earth is round. What a gift

      to have my work shed shudder with thunder.

Reverse Prayer

      I pray for Mandelstam hiding covered

      with snow in a ditch. The Stalinists want to kill

      him and finally succeed. I want him to escape

      to Nebraska, please God. I pray for Lorca

      that СКАЧАТЬ