Jim Harrison, the great American writer, novelist and poet, died on Saturday night at the age of 78. His last book of poems, Dead’s Man Float, was published by Copper Canyon in January of this year.

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.

Old Man

An old man is a spindly junk pile.

He is so brittle he can fall

through himself top to bottom.

No mirror is needed to see the layers

of detritus, some years clogged with it.

The red bloody layer of auto deaths

of dad and sister. Deaths piled like cordwood

at the cabin, the body 190 pounds of ravaged

nerve ends from disease. The junk pile is without

sympathy for itself. A life is a life,

lived among birds and forests and fields.

It knew many dogs, a few bears and wolves.

Some women said they wanted to murder him

but what is there worth murdering?

The body, of course, the criminal body

doing this and that. Some will look

for miraculous gold nuggets in the junk

and find a piece of fool’s gold in the empty

cans of menudo, a Mexican tripe stew.

February

Warm enough here in Patagonia AZ to read

the new Mandelstam outside in my underpants

which is to say he was never warm enough

except in summer and he was without paper to write

and his belly was mostly empty most of the time

like that Mexican girl I picked up on a mountain road

the other day who couldn’t stop weeping. She had slept

out two nights in a sweater in below-freezing weather.

She had been headed to Los Angeles but the coyote

took her money and abandoned her in the wilderness.

Her shoes were in pieces and her feet bleeding.

I took her to town and bought her food. She got a ride

to Nogales. She told us in Spanish that she just wanted

to go home and sleep in her own bed. That’s what Mandelstam

wanted with mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. Everyone

wants this. Mandelstam said, “To be alone is to be alive.”

“Lost and looked in the sky’s asylum eye.” “What of

her nights?” Maybe she was watched by some of the fifty

or so birds I have in the yard now. When they want to

they just fly away. I gave them my yard and lots of food.

They smile strange bird smiles. She couldn’t fly away.

Neither can I though I’ve tried a lot lately to migrate

to the Camargue on my own wings. When they are married,

Mandelstam and the Mexican girl, in heaven they’ll tell

long stories of the horrors of life on earth ending each session

by chanting his beautiful poems that we did not deserve.

Life

I’m not so good at life anymore.

Sometimes I wake up and don’t recognize it.

Houses, cars, furniture, books are a blur

while trees, birds, and horses are fine

and clear. I also understand music

of an ancient variety—pre-ninteenth century.

Where have I been?

Recounting flowers from the train window

between Seville and Granada, also bulls and olive trees.

I couldn’t sleep in Lorca’s room because it was haunted.

Even the wine I carried was haunted.

Spain has never recovered from this murder.

Her nights are full of the red teeth of death.

There were many who joined him. You can’t count,

up and down, birds and flowers at the same time.

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.

Bridge

Most of my life was spent

building a bridge out over the sea

though the sea was too wide.

I’m proud of the bridge

hanging in the pure sea air. Machado

came for a visit and we sat on the

end of the bridge, which was his idea.

Now that I’m old the work goes slowly.

Ever nearer death, I like it out here

high above the sea bundled

up for the arctic storms of late fall,

the resounding crash and moan of the sea,

the hundred-foot depth of the green troughs.

Sometimes the sea roars and howls like

the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.

What beauty in this the darkest music

over which you can hear the lightest music of human

behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above

the abyss. Tonight the moon will be in my lap.

This is my job, to study the universe

from my bridge. I have the sky, the sea, the faint

green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.

Where Is Jim Harrison?

He fell off the cliff of a seven-inch zafu.

He couldn’t get up because of his surgery.

He believes in the Resurrection mostly

because he was never taught how not to.