If you stick around the store long enough, you’ll hear John talk about Jim Harrison. The average time span for this happening is 5.68 minutes. I’ve timed it.
And if you read any of Harrison’s work, especially, his poetry, you’ll understand why. It’s meditative, but not intimidating. Funny, but not flippant. In his last book, Dead Man’s Float, he thinks a lot about mortality—particularly his own—without being morbid. Let’s take a look at his short poem “Birds.”
The birds are flying around frantically
in the thunderstorm that just began, the
first in weeks and weeks. They are enjoying
themselves. I think I’ll join them.
I like this poem because of how much work it can do, depending on what you’re looking for. It can either be a lighthearted quick glimpse out of a window through which we see a storm-littered yard punctuated with birds playing and a grown man frolicking in a sort of second childhood. And/or/also, we can view Harrison’s signature focus on birds and landscapes as a longing for purity, for a spiritual weightlessness freed from the burdens of life itself: a mashup of Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches on the soul” and Keats’ nightingale that sings because it doesn’t live in a space “Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.” These birds are boundless, and Harrison wants that same freedom. He’s welcoming flying from this earth. Again, as Dickinson says, “from the earth, the light balloon asks nothing but release.”
Jim Harrison knew he was dying when he wrote the poems in Dead Man’s Float. The grace with which he accepts his very end is comforting, but not all of the poems are about his life’s sunset. In another imitating-animals move, the poem “Mad Dog,” Harrison tells us that he “envied the dog lying in the yard,” so he lies down with it, rolling around, unable to find the same level of blissful comfort that his canine counterpart does. We’ve all been here: trying to make ourselves happy but blocked by ourselves. It’s funny, tongue in cheek, light.
On March 26, on the third anniversary of Jim Harrison’s death, fans of Harrison will gather at the bookstore and read aloud from Dead Man’s Float. Join us. You don’t have to read aloud, or even be an expert in poems. Show up and listen. Jim would approve.
Night Hunt
–for Jim HarrisonThrough winter-thin trees,
an owl’s empty calls echoes.
No bird to be seen, but
in this near dusk, I hear it—
a clear tunnel of sound.Branch-rustle and swoop,
the quiet snatch of talons
on ground. One less field
mouse. Silence. Then
the cold song resumes.-Jamie Dickson
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