The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.
I’ve made this path and nobody else
leading crookedly up through the pasture
where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.
It is here where my mind begins to learn
my heart’s language on this endless
wobbly path,
veering south and north
informed by my all-too-vivid dreams
which are a compass without a needle.
Today the gods speak in drunk talk
pulling at a heart too old for this walk,
a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth
of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.
Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names
of a dozen friends
who have died in recent years,
names now incomprehensible as the mountains
across the river far behind me.
I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.
Perhaps when we die our names are taken
from us by a divine magnet and are free
to flutter here and there within the bodies
of birds. I’ll be a simple crow
who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.
--Jim Harrison
Very recently, researching the writers who clustered in Key West in the early 1970s for my latest "History of My Reading" post, I watched on You Tube a film made about them. Jim Harrison was one of them, but he'd died before the film was made. Towards the end of the film, writer Tom McGuane, his close friend in Key West and elsewhere, read the first part of this poem to the camera. Then suddenly his voice overlapped with Jim Harrison reading the rest of the poem, filmed evidently for a PBS segment years earlier. He was standing in front of Antelope Butte in Montana.
As I looked and listened, I noticed the orange logo on his t-shirt, which looked familiar. And then I looked down at myself: the orange logo was on the pocket of the dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt I was wearing as I watched, the exact replica of Jim Harrison's. So this was another reason this poem seemed appropriate for my 79th birthday.
Harrison was 79 in 2016 when he died from a heart attack--instantly, according to his daughter--with pen in hand, while writing a poem. Not the worst way for a writer to go. By then he'd known his heart was weakened, as the poem indicates. Besides becoming a simple crow, he also had wished to be reincarnated as a tree.
