North
“The mind of which we are unaware is aware of us.”
R.D. Laing
The rising sun not beet
or blood,
but sea-rose red.
I amplified my heartbeat
one thousand times;
the animals at first confused,
then decided I was another
thunder being.
While talking directly to god
my attention waxed and waned.
I have a lot on my mind.
I worked out
to make myself as strong
as water.
After all these years
of holding the world together
I let it roll down the hill
into the river.
One tree leads
to another,
walking on
this undescribed earth.
I have dreamed
myself back
to where
I already am.
On a cold day
bear, coyote, cranes.
On a rainy night
a wolf with yellow eyes.
On a windy day
eleven kestrels looking
down at me.
On a hot afternoon
the ravens floated over
where I sunk
myself in the river.
Way out there
in unknown country
I walked at night
to scare myself.
Who is this other,
the secret sharer,
who directs the hand
that twists the heart,
the voice calling out to me
between feather and stone
the hours before dawn?
Somehow
I have turned into
an old brown man
in a green coat.
Having fulfilled
my obligations
my heart moves lightly
to this downward dance.
--Jim Harrison
I think I first became aware of a writer named Jim Harrison in the late 1980s, through his prose pieces in Esquire and Smart, a new magazine for which he wrote a column. In particular I recall one column that introduced me to the work of Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor. Harrison was known for his fiction, and it wasn't long before I was reading it. He was already famous for the novella "Legends of the Fall," made into a Hollywood film. One of the first of his fictions I remember reading was the novella "Julip" when it was published in full in Esquire. He was credited with reviving the novella form (longer than a story, shorter than a novel.)
Since then I've read all of his published novellas and 10 of his 12 novels, plus two volumes of non-fiction. I continue to believe that his linked novels Dalva and The Road Home are worthy candidates as the Great American Novel of the second half of the 20th century. I've reviewed several of these books, for (among others) Orion Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review.
But it was a little while before I connected this Jim Harrison to the author of a book of poems I acquired in the early 1970s (Outlyer and Ghazals.) But they are the same person. Eventually I caught up with his collection of selected and new poems in the late 90s, titled The Shape of the Journey. The poem above is in that volume, which had the feeling of elegy, of last words. Nevertheless he published several more volumes of poems after that, as well as a lot more fiction.
I didn't know Jim Harrison, though I knew or met several people important in his working life, like the poet Denise Levertov, who championed his early work and got his first book published, his lifelong friend and poet Gary Snyder, the writer Jack Turner, even his literary agent, who at one time considered representing me, and offered opinions of a list of my proposed article subjects, approving of all but one, because nobody was interested in shopping malls and American culture.
So if I feel as if I knew him it's because of his words: his writing and his talk in many interviews published over the years. He shared with Gary Snyder a deep experience in the natural world and an interest in Zen philosophy and meditation. But he was quite different in other ways, or at least more public about it. His characters are funny, outrageous, ribald and victims of their vices and their innocence. We can only guess how much like them Harrison was in his complex life.
Writing was central to Jim Harrison's being, and he felt closest to his poetry. "To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say," he wrote. "For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime." Jim Harrison died suddenly in March 2016, pen in hand.
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