People Say Cool Things

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Time

Time our subtle poison runs toward us, and through us, and out the other side. We’ve never been in the future except for a moment. Time’s poison is in the air we breathe and the faint taste in the water we drink. We are dogs who love their morning walks but not their names. They don’t know they’re dogs, but no one had the right to give them the wrong names. Time never told us to have faith in the sepulcher that awaits us. The night carves us into separate acts, but I do have faith in that turbulent creek of blood within me. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Up

Here I am at the gateless gate again hoping to see father, mother, sister, brother. Where did they come from? Where did they go? I keep climbing this tree as old as the world and have lost my voice up here in the thin air. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Goat Boy

I no longer lead my life. I’m led. The sexuality of insects tells us that intentional life is a hoax but the gods tell us that we are also gods. The sun kindly rises  on the snoring goat out by the barn. He’ll only do what he wants to do. He eats potato peels and stares at the rising moon. I believe in my calling like he believes in the moon. How else could I see clearly at night? We are nature, too, and some of us do less well in this invented world, or if we do well for a while there is that backward stare from these overplowed fields to the wild woodlot and creek in the distance. At seven I went out to play and was lost in the woods for a day and never understood the way back home. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Small Gods

My hope is that this minuscule prayer will reach out to the god unknown I just sensed passing in the rivulet of breeze above the mere rivulet of water in this small arroyo. To the skittering insect this place is as large as the Sea of Galilee. In a prayer I’m a complicated insect, moving this way and that. The insect before me puzzles over its current god, my dog Zilpha, who watches with furrowed brow and thinks, “Should I paw at this bug in this shallow pool, bite it, roll on it in this tiny creek in the late afternoon heat, or perhaps take another nap?” She looks at her god, which is me, understanding as her eyes close that the gods make up their minds as they go. They are as patient as the water in which they live, and won’t be surprise when they reach the sea with their vast collection of reflections, the man, the dog, the stars and moon and clouds, the javelina and countless birds, bugs and minnows, the delicate sips of rattlers, the boughs of mesquite, the carapace of the desert tortoise, the heron footprints, the water’s memories of earth. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Complaint & Plea

Of late I’ve been afflicted by too many hummingbirds, a red moon rising again in the smoke of forest fires, a record long heat tsunami, the unpardonable vigor of the hollyhocks pressing against the green studio, their gorgeous trashiness as flowers (some call them weeds), the fledgling redtail hawks crying all day because they don’t want to fly, the big rattler I shot near our front door twisting itself into the usual question mark, the river I want to fish turbulent and brown from a distant thunderstorm, the studio steps I fell off with the ground I used to love floating up to meet me, the deepest sense that life which is a prolonged funeral service won’t behave, that I’m living within a glass orb that a monster brat won’t stop shaking. A friend wrote, “I have moments when I think life may have gotten to be too much for me or that I haven’t gotten to be enough for it.” Yes, life is a holographic merry-go-round that whirls at the speed of light in all directions at once. To whom may I address my plea that the river clear so that I might go fishing? The fish must learn that pretty flies can have hooks in them. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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The Home

If my body is my home what is this house full of blood within my skin? I can’t leave it for a moment but finally will. It knows up and down, sideways, the texture of the future and remnants of the past. It accepts moods as law no matter how furtively they slip in and out of consciousness. It accepts dreams as law of a different sort as if they came from a body well hidden within his own. He says, “Pull yourself together,” but he already is. An old voice says, “Stay close to home.” -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Insight

After we die we hover for a while at treetop level with the mourners beneath us, but we are not separate from them nor they from us. They are singing but the words don’t mean anything in our new language. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Peonies

The peonies, too heavy with their beauty, slump to the ground. I had hoped they would live forever but ever so slowly day by day they’re becoming the soil of their birth with a faint tang of deliquescence around them. Next June they’ll somehow remember to come alive again, a little trick we have or have not learned. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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New World

This moment says no to the next. Now is quite enough for the gathering birds in the tall willows above the irrigation ditch. It’s autumn and their intentions are in their blood. Looking up at these chattering birds I become dizzy, but statistics say old men fall down a lot. The earth is fairly soft here, so far from the world of cement where people must live to make a living. Despite the New Covenant you can’t eat the field’s lilies. Today I think I see a new cold wind rushing through the air. Of course I stare up too long because I love cedar waxwings, their nasalate click and hiss, their cantankerous joy. I fall and the dogs come running. Mary licks my face. I tell them that this is a world where falling is best. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Old Bird Boy

Birds know us as “the people of the feet.” I am watched as I walk around and around my green studio, a man of many beaten paths. Near me a willow flycatcher arcs in its air dance to catch a grasshopper, a swift move that I compare to nothing whatsoever that I do. They own the air we breathe. I’ve studied the feet of the bridled titmouse for years, how they seem to be made of spiderwebs so precariously attached to perch or ground, also the feet of the golden eagle which are death angels, and then the wings of all birds which on close inspection don’t seem possible. Most birds own the ancient clock of north and south, a clock that never had hands, the god-time with which the universe began. As the end draws nearer I’ve taken to praying to be reincarnated as a bird, and if not worthy of that, a tree in which they live so I could cradle them as I did our daughters and grandsons. Three times last April down on the border a dozen Chihuahuan ravens accompanied me on walks when I sang the right croaking song. I was finally within them. For the first time in my life I dared to say aloud, “I am blessed.” -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Alien

It was one of those mornings when my feet seemed unaware of each other and I walked slowly up a canyon wash to avoid tripping. It was warmish at dawn but the sun wouldn’t quite come out, having missed a number of good chances, or so I thought studying the antic clouds that were behaving as sloppily as the government. I was looking for a wildflower, the penstemon, but stopped at a rock pool in a miniature marsh seeing a Mojave rattlesnake curled up in the cup of a low-slung boulder. Since this snake can kill a cow or horse I detoured through a dense thicket then glimpsed the small opening of a side canyon I had not noticed in my seventeen years of living down the road. How could I have missed it except that it’s my habit to miss a great deal? And then the sun came out and frightened me as if I had stumbled onto a well-hidden house of the gods, roofless and only a hundred feet long, backed by a sheer wall of stone. I smelled the telltale urine of a mountain lion but no cave was visible until I looked up at a passing Mexican jay who shrieked the usual warning. We move from fear to fear. I knew the lion would be hiding there in the daytime more surely than I had seen the snake. They weren’t guardians. This is where they lived. These small rock cathedrals are spread around the landscape in hundreds of variations but this one had the rawness of the unseen, giving me an edge of discomfort rarely felt in nature except in Ecuador and the Yucatán where I had appeared as a permanent stranger. I sat down with my back tight against a sheer wall thinking that the small cave entrance I faced by craning my neck must be the home of the old female lion seen around here not infrequently and that she could only enter from a crevasse at the top, downward into her cave. This is nature without us. This is someone’s home where I don’t belong. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Shortcomings

Only thirteen birds at first light. Some are near the French doors to tell me that they need more food. I did poorly at French and Italian but know how to ask for food in their countries. So did birds up north where chickadees would peck at the window saying the feeder is empty. Down here the different types of orioles say, “More grapes please.” I know dog language fairly well but then dogs hold a little back from us because we don’t know their secret names given them by the dog gods. Nature withholds and hides from us until we try to learn her languages. Yesterday a Chihuahuan raven replied to me in a voice I had never heard before saying, “You don’t speak very well.” In 20,000 walks you’re bound to learn a little. Doors finally open where you didn’t know there were doors and windows lose their dirty class. After a night of extreme pain I had glimpses of a new world. A rock brought me to red tears. Of course death will interrupt us soon enough, or so they say, but right now walking through a canyon I can’t imagine not walking through a canyon. On a new side of night I asked the gods to not let me learn too much. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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It's a tough job to explain the meaning of life when you have no idea.

Jim Harrison, Land Divers, In Search of Small Gods

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Lunar

Out in the nighttime in the caliche-gravel driveway doing a shuffle dance to the music of the lunar eclipse, a dark gray and reddish smear blocking the moon. I’m embarrassed by my dance steps learned from the Ojibwe over fifty years ago, but then who’s watching but a few startled birds, especially a canyon wren nesting in a crack of the huge rock face? Without the moon’s white light the sky is suddenly overpopulated with stars like China and India with people. The stars cast the longest of shadows. I dance until I’m a breathless old fool thinking that the spirit of this blinded moon is as real as that enormous toad that used to bury itself between the house and the barn of our farm in Lake Leelanau. One evening I watched him slowly erupt from the ground. Now the moon’s white light begins to show itself, shining off looming Red Mountain where years ago I’m told a Mexican boy climbed to the top to play a song more closely to his dead sister. Luna, luna, luna, we must sing to praise living and dead. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Hospital

No poems about copious blood in the urine, tumors as big as a chicken beneath beneath the waistline. We’ve long since found these truths quite evident. Life has never been in remission or rehabilitation. Life doesn’t sing those homely words we invented to blind our eyes to this idyll of metamorphoses which can include unbearable pain and unbearable joy. Death by starvation or gluttony are but a block away in some cities known to us for their artifacts. Today I regretted closing this lowly stinkbug in the gate, feeling the crunch of it beneath my foot to push it on. My heart must open to the cosmos with no language unless we invent it moment by moment in order to breathe. A girl in a green bathing suit swam across the green river above which swallows flocked in dark whirls. She swam toward a green bank lined with green willows. The guiding light of our sun averages half a day. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Age Sity-nine

I keep waiting without knowing what I’m waiting for. I saw the setting moon at dawn roll over the mountain and perhaps into the dragon’s mouth until tomorrow evening. There is this circle I walk that I have learned to love. I hope one day to be a spiral but to the birds I’m a circle. A thousand Spaniards died looking for gold in a swamp when it was in the mountains in clear sight beyond. Here, though, on local earth my heart is at rest as a groundling, letting my mind take flight as it will, no longer waiting for good or bad news. Often, lately, the night is a cold maw and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods, which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds, clearly divine messengers that I don’t understand yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions. -Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

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Hard Times

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, In Search of Small Gods