Shelter.

PATAGONIA POEM

Here in the first morning sunlight I’m trying 
to locate myself not by latitude 31.535646 N
or longitude 110.747511 W, but by the skin
of my left hand at the edge of the breakfast plate.
This hand has the skin and fingers of an animal.
The right hand forks the egg of a bird, a chicken.
The bright yellow yolk was formerly alive
in the guts of the bird waiting for the absent rooster.
Since childhood it has been a struggle 
not to run away and hide in a thicket and sometimes
I did so. Now I write “Jim” with egg yolk
on the white plate in order to remember my name,
and suddenly both hands look like
an animal’s who also hides in a remote thicket.
I feel my head and the skull ever so slightly
beneath the skin, a primate’s skull that tells
me a thicket is a good idea for my limited 
intelligence, and this hand holding a pen, a truly
foreign object I love, could with its brother hand
build a shelter in which to rest awhile and take
delight in life again, to wander in the moonlight 
when earth achieves its proper shape, to rest looking
out through a tangle of branches at a daylight
world that can’t see back in at this animal shape.

Jim Harrison