"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.