5.20.2026 – the question, of course

the question, of course,
is how you can make your soul
clap its hands and sing

The question, of course, is how you make your soul clap its hands and sing.

My bones seemed built out of incomprehension.

The road was rutted enough by winter rains so that the car drove itself.

I was ringed by four mountain ranges in this valley but then natural beauty seems to offer no more than you can bring to it. There was scarcely a patch in a thousand square miles I hadn’t covered on foot.

Looking down you see blue and black gama, side oats gama, curly mesquite, sprangle-top, and the grassy skin of the local earth.

Straight up is invariably sky.

Up in my own country it was apparently our nature to kill seventy million buffalo just as it was our nature to destroy the Native cultures.

History will not help your soul clap its hands and sing but it is unconscionable to proceed without knowing it.

From True North by Jim Harrison (New York, Grove Press, 2004).

Mr. Harrison is referencing the poem, Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats.

Mr. Harrison quotes the 2nd of 4 stanzas.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing.

And louder sing.

An aged man is but a paltry thing.

History will not help your soul clap its hands and sing but it is unconscionable to proceed without knowing it.

So much news of late.

How frail our constitution was.

How frail life is.

Therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

BTW – to make this work, I had to add a word to Mr. Harrison’s words … have a feeling he would not have been happy but when I do the same thing to Shakespeare and Sandburg …