Actually.

16

  My favorite stump straddles a gully a dozen

  miles from any human habitation.

  My eschatology includes scats, animal poop,

  scatology so that when I nestle under this stump

  out of the rain I see the scats of bear, bobcat,

  coyote. I won’t say that I feel at home

  under this vast white pine stump, the roots

  spread around me, so large in places no arms

  can encircle them, as if you were under the body

  of a mythic spider, the thunder ratcheting

  the sky so that the earth hums beneath you.

  Here is a place to think about nothing,

  which is what I do. If the rain beats down

  hard enough tiny creeks form beside my shit-strewn

  pile of sand. The coyote has been eating mice,

  the bear berries, the bobcat a rabbit. It’s dry

  enough so it doesn’t smell except for ancient

  wet wood and gravel, pine pitch, needles. Luckily

  a sandhill crane nests nearby so that in June

  if I doze I’m awakened by her cracked

  and prehistoric cry, waking startled, feeling

  the two million years I actually am.

Jim Harrison