Jim Harrison - Renegade, Earthy Poet

Winter Moon by Marion

Barking
By Jim Harrison

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn't die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there's no chain.

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Flowers, 2001
By Jim Harrison

Near a flowershop off boulevard Raspail
a woman in a sundress bending over,
I'd guess about 49 years of age
in a particular bloom, just entering
the early autumn of her life,
a thousand year old smile on her face
so wide open that I actually shuddered
the same shudder I did in 1989
coming over the tip of a sand dune
and seeing a big bear below me.

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Older Love
By Jim Harrison

His wife has asthma
so he only smokes outdoors
or late at night with head
and shoulders well into
the fireplace, the mesquite and oak
heat bright against his face.
Does it replace the heat
that has wandered from love
back into the natural world?
But then the shadow passion casts
is much longer than passion,
stretching with effort from year to year.
Outside tonight hard wind and sleet
from three bald mountains,
and on the hearth before his face
the ashes we’ll all become,
soft as the back of a woman’s knee.

from "Saving Daylight".

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"Saving Daylight" is my favorite book by Jim Harrison.  Though he's famous for his fiction, I love his poetry much better than his novels.  He's been compared to both Faulkner and Hemingway.  All I know is that he's an amazing poet, in touch with the earth.

I'll be away from my computer next week for a few days, but I'll be back on Thursday.  I hope you all have an awesome week!

Love & Blessings,

~Marion

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"God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars." ~Martin Luther

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"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back." ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

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The poetry of the earth is never dead. ~John Keats
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