"Fence Line Tree" by Jim Harrison

Image by George Raab

There's a single tree at the fence line

here in Montana, a little like a tree

in the Sandhills of Nebraska, which may be miles

away. When I cross the unfertile pasture strewn

with rocks and the holes of gophers, badgers, coyotes,

and the rattlesnake den (a thousand killed

in a decade because they don't mix well with dogs

and children) in an hour's walking and reach

the tree, I find it oppressive. Likely it's

as old as I am, withstanding its isolation,

all gnarled and twisted from its battle

with weather. I sit against it until we merge,

and when I return home in the cold, windy

twilight I feel I've been gone for years.

"Fence Line Tree" by Jim Harrison, from Saving Daylight. © Copper Canyon Press, 2006.

"Peonies" by Jim Harrison

"Peonies" Matilda Brown 1907

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.

"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.