Tuesday, November 8, 2016

"Carpe Diem" by Jim Harrison

"An Abundance of Apples" Levi Wells Prentice (1851 - 1935)


Night and day
seize the day, also the night —
a handful of water to grasp.
The moon shines off the mountain 
snow where grizzlies look for a place 
for the winter’s sleep and birth. 
I just ate the year’s last tomato 
in the year’s fatal whirl. 
This is mid-October, apple time. 
I picked them for years. 
One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels. 
It was the birth of love that year. 
Sometimes we live without noticing it. 
Overtrying makes it harder. 
I fell down through the tree grabbing 
branches to slow the fall, got the afternoon off. 
We drove her aqua Ford convertible into the country 
with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect 
day with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves 
into the future together seizing the day. 
Fifty years later we hold each other looking 
out the windows at birds, making dinner, 
a life to live day after day, a life of 
dogs and children and the far wide country 
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains. 
So far the days keep coming. 
Seize the day gently as if you loved her. 

"Carpe Diem" by Jim Harrison from Dead Man's Float. © Copper Canyon Press, 2016.

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