Hard Times
by Jim Harrison
The other boot doesn't drop from heaven.
I've made this path and nobody else
leading crookedly up through the pasture
where I'll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.
It is here where my mind begins to learn
my heart's language on this endless
wobbly path, veering south and north
informed by my all-too-vivid dreams
which are a compass without a needle.
Today the gods speak in drunk talk
pulling at a heart too old for this walk,
a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth
of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.
Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names
of a dozen friends who have died in recent years,
names now incomprehensible as the mountains
across the river far behind me.
I'll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.
Perhaps when we die our names are taken
from us by a divine magnet and are free
to flutter here and there within the bodies
of birds. I'll be a simple crow
who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.
From In Search of Small Gods (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
From the same friend as the Richard Wilbur pieces, I have found a love of the lines, “It is here where my mind begins to learn my heart's language on this endless wobbly path…” And the gorgeous end, the notion that our names — the identities we have carried, the categories that have defined us — are magnetized away by the divine at death. What remains is the self without name, free to flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.
Jim Harrison (1937-2016) is one of the great American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — novelist (Legends of the Fall, Dalva, The Road Home), poet across roughly twenty collections, essayist, and food writer. He lived variously in northern Michigan, Montana, and the Patagonia region of southern Arizona; he wrote in the tradition of Neruda, Whitman, and the Chinese poets he loved (Han Shan, Tu Fu, Wang Wei); he was a lifelong Zen practitioner and student of Kobun Chino Otogawa. He died of a heart attack in Arizona in March 2016 at age seventy-eight, at his writing desk, mid-poem.
