few years back began to lose the world of people I couldn’t hold on …
INVISIBLE as published in Jim Harrison: Complete Poems by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press, 2021).
Within the wilder shores of sky billions of insects are migrating for reasons of sex and food, or so I’m told by science, in itself as invisible as the specters of love and death. What can I see from here but paper and the mind’s random images? A living termite was found on sticky paper at 19,000 feet. Perhaps she thought she had lost the world as I think I must, barring flora, fauna, family, dogs, the earth, the mind ground of being as it is. A few years back I began to lose the world of people. I couldn’t hold on. Rüppell’s vulture was seen at 36,000 feet for reasons the gods keep from us.
songs that greet sunrise rain, twilight – Here I am – sing what and where they are
Sunrise on Hilton Head Island …
Not how many different birds I’ve seen but how many have seen me, letting the event go unremarked except for the quietest sense of malevolence, dead quiet, then restarting their lives after fear, not with song, which is reserved for lovers, but the harsh and quizzical chatter with which we all get by: but if she or he passes by and the need is felt we hear the music that transcends all fear, and sometimes the simpler songs that greet sunrise, rain or twilight. Here I am. They sing what and where they are.
Geo-Bestiary, #34 as published in Jim Harrison: Complete Poems by Jim Harrison, Copper Canyon Press, 2021.
God’s toes are buried deep in the earth He’s ready to run but … but where?
The cost of flight is landing. On this warm winter day in the southwest, down here on the edge of the border I want to go to France where we all came from where the Occident was born near the ancient caves near Lascaux. At home I’m only 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 dove within inches of the rocks before it stopped and rose again. God’s toes are buried deep in the earth. He’s ready to run. But where?
New ways – live longer but years added at the end not in the middle
The news abounds with stories of how folks are living longer and as there are more and more people (hard to believe that the population of the United States has doubled since World War 2), more and more people are living longer.
Looks like getting off cigarettes and caffeinated coffee is working.
There is a catch.
Much like the people who go jogging for sixty minutes every day and claim it adds 15 years to their life.
Well, those years were spent … jogging.
Live to be 65 and not jog.
Or live to be 80 and spend 15 years jogging.
Almost sounds like a prison sentence.
Back to the point there are lots of actions we can take, things we can do and things we can avoid and add years to life.
But … those years are added at the end.
What if we can add years in the middle?
What if somehow the years between 30 and 50 could be doubled.
The years when I felt good or at least better.
The years when going to the beach where nothing but fun and not filled with anxieties not the least of which is how far will we end up from the restrooms.
That might be worth considering …
Add those 20 years to my life when I am 70 and live to 90?
Makes me appreciate the age I am and enjoy the years I have and not live with an eye on how what I am doing or eating may or may not add to my years.
It can become an obsession.
Consider what JRR Tolkien wrote in The Two Towers, the middle book of his The Lord of the Rings.
Death was ever present, because the Nmenoreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging.
Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons.
Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars.
And the last king of the line of Anarion had no heir.
Hungered after endless life unchanging.
Life changes.
As Jim Harrison once wrote (or words to this effect) “Eat that delicious fat with your Prime Rib. Then take a long walk to justify it.”
he wrote we have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts
I suspect that it’s inappropriate to strand myself on a high horse when it comes to what people eat. We have proved ourselves inept fools on so many mortal fronts — from our utter disregard of the natural world to our notions of ethnic virtue to the hellish marriage of politics and war — that perhaps we should be allowed to pick at garbage like happy crows. When I was growing up in the Calvinist Midwest, the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels. (With the exception, of course, of holiday feasts. Certain women were famous for their pie-making abilities, while certain men, like my father, were admired for being able to barbecue two hundred chickens at once for a church picnic.) I recall that working in the fields for ten hours a day required an ample breakfast and three big sandwiches for lunch. At the time, I don’t think I believed I was all that different from the other farm animals.
Jim Harrison in A Really Big Lunch published in the New Yorker, Aug 29, 2004.
Garrison Keillor wrote in his 1991 book, WLT: A Radio Romance, “Don’t concern yourself with things you can’t change, I say. It’s more important to make a very good cup of coffee in the morning and a very good piece of toast than it is to worry about Josef Stalin, because I can do something about breakfast and I can’t do anything about Stalin, and I’m sure he’s having a wonderful breakfast.”
