Dead Man's Float. Jim Harrison

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.

      Back 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.