Jim Harrison

I feel my failure intensely as if it were a vital organ the gods grew from the side of my head. You can't cover it with a hat and I no longer can sleep on that side it's so tender. I wasn't quite faithful enough to carry this sort of weight up the mountain. When I took my vows at nineteen I had no idea that gods were so merciless. Fear makes for good servants and bravery is fraudulent. When I awoke I wasn't awake enough.

I worry much about the suffering of Machado. I was only one when he carried his mother across the border from Spain to France in a rainstorm. She died and so did he a few days later in a rooming house along a dry canal. To carry Mother he abandoned a satchel holding his last few years of poetry. I've traveled to Collioure several times to search for Machado's lost satchel. The French fed him but couldn't save him. There's no true path to a death — we discover the path by walking. We turn a corner on no road and there's a house on a green hill with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle. Are the poems in the basement of the house on the hill? We'll find out if we remember earth at all.

1 The Saturday morning meadowlark came in from high up with her song gliding into tall grass still singing. How I'd like to glide around singing in the summer then to go south to where I already was and find fields full of meadowlarks in winter. But when walking my dog I want four legs to keep up with her as she thunders down the hill at top speed then belly flops into the deep pond. Lark or dog I crave the impossible. I'm just human. All too human. 2 I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah. The hem of his robe was as wide as the horizon and his trunk and face were thousands of feet up in the air. Maybe he appeared because I had read him so much and opened too many ancient doors. I was cooking my life in a cracked clay pot that was leaking. I had found secrets I didn't deserve to know. When the battle for the mind is finally over it's late June, green and raining. 3 A violent windstorm the night before the solstice. The house creaked and yawned. I thought the morning might bring a bald earth, bald as a man's bald head but not shiny. But dawn was fine with a few downed trees, the yellow rosebush splendidly intact. The grass was all there dotted with Black Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible except to fire but now it's too green to burn. What did the cattle do in this storm? They stood with their butts toward the wind, erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular. I was in bed cringing at gusts, imagining the contents of earth all blowing north and piled up where the wind stopped, the pile sky-high. No one can climb it. A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened. 4 The sun should be a couple of million miles closer today. It wouldn't hurt anything and anyway this cold rainy June is hard on me and the nesting birds. My own nest is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair of many years. The old windows don't keep the weather out, the wet wind whipping my hair. A very old robin drops dead on the lawn, a first for me. Millions of birds die but we never see it—they like privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so I think. We can't tell each other when we die. Others must carry the message to and fro. "He's gone," they'll say. While writing an average poem destined to disappear among the millions of poems written now by mortally average poets. 5 Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest. The full moon shines in the river, there are pale green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes a nearby tamarack bursting into flame. I go into the cabin feeling unworthy. At dawn the tree is still smoldering in this place the gods touched earth.

Yes, we'll gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river. They say it runs by the throne of God. This is where God invented fish. Wherever, but then God's throne is as wide as the universe. If you're attentive you'll see the throne's borders in the stars. We're on this side and when you get to the other side we don't know what will happen if anything. If nothing happens we won't know it, I said once. Is that cynical? No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just nothing. Then again maybe we'll be cast at the speed of light through the universe to God's throne. His hair is bounteous. All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there. The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back so as not to frighten the little ones. Even now they remember this divine habitat. Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river? We'll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.

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?

At dawn I heard among bird calls the billions of marching feet in the churn and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid, and very old halting feet, the feet of the very light and very heavy, all marching but not together, criss-crossing at every angle with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump into each other, walking in the doors of houses and out the back door forty years later, finally knowing that time collapses on a single plateau where they were all their lives, knowing that time stops when the heart stops as they walk off the earth into the night air.

I envied the dog lying in the yard so I did it. But there was a pebble under my flank so I got up and looked for the pebble, brushed it away and lay back down. My dog thus far overlooked the pebble. I guess it's her thick Lab fur. With my head downhill the blood gorged me with ideas. Not good. Got up. Turned around. Now I see hundreds of infinitesimal ants. I'm on an ant home. I get up and move five feet. The dog hasn't moved from her serene place. Now I'm rather too near a thicket where I saw a big black snake last week that might decide to join me. I moved near the actual dog this time but she got up and went under the porch. She doesn't like it when I'm acting weird. I'm failing as a dog when my own kind rejects me, but doing better than when I envied birds, the creature the least like us, therefore utterly enviable. To be sure I cheeped a lot but didn't try to fly. We humans can take off but are no good at landing.

Out the window of the bar I’m watching a circle of girls stretching and yawning across the street. It’s late January and 74 degrees. They love the heat because they are a moist heat. Heat loves heat and today is a tease for what comes with spring around here when the glorious birds funnel back up from Mexico. The girls don’t care about birds because they are birds. I recall in high school a half dozen cheerleaders resting on a wrestling mat in short shorts in the gym, me beside them with a silly groin ache. What were they? Living, lovely, warm meat as we all are reaching out of our bodies for someone else.

The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.

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.