Far.

The GOLDEN WINDOW

By accident my heart lifted with a rush.

Gone for weeks, finally home on a darkish day

of blustery wind, napped, waking in a few minutes

and the sun had come clean and crept around the house,

this light from one of trillions of stars

falling through the window skeined

by the willow’s greenish bright yellow leaves

so that my half-asleep head opened wide

for the first time in many months, a cold sunstroke,

so yellow-gold, so gold-yellow, yellow-gold,

this eye beyond age bathed in yellow light.

* * *

Seventy days on the river with a confusion between

river turbulence and human tribulation. We are here

to be curious not consoled. The gift of the gods

is consciousness not my forlorn bleating prayers

for equilibrium, the self dog-paddling in circles

on its own alga-lidded pond. Emily Walter wrote:

“We are given rivers so we know our hearts

can break, but still keep us breathing.”

* * *

When you run through the woods blindfolded

you’re liable to collide with trees, I thought

one hot afternoon on the river. You can’t drown yourself

if you swim well. We saw some plovers

and then a few yellow legs with their peculiar cries,

and I remembered a very cold, windy September day

with Matthiessen and Danny when the birds lifted

me far out of myself. It was so cold and blustery the avian

world descended into the river valley and while fishing

we saw a golden eagle, two immature and two adult

bald eagles, two prairie falcons, two peregrines, Cooper’s

hawks, two Swainson’s, a sharp-shinned,

a rough-legged, a harrier, five turkey vultures,

three ospreys, and also saw buffleheads, widgeon,

teal, mallards, morning doves, kingfishers,

ring-billed gulls, killdeer, spotted plovers,

sandpipers and sandhill cranes.

They also saw us. If a peregrine sees fifty times better

than we, what do we look like to them?

 Unanswerable.

* * *

Nearing seventy there is a tinge of the usually

unseen miraculous when you wake up alive

from a night’s sleep or a nap. We always rise in the terrifying

posture of the living. Some days the river is incomprehensible.

No, not the posture, but that a terrifying beauty

is born within us. I think of the 20-acre thicket

my mother planted after the deaths 40 years ago,

the thicket now nearly impenetrable as its own beauty.

Across the small pond the green heron looked at me quizzically—

who is this? I said I wasn’t sure at that moment

wondering if the green heron could be Mother.

* * *

Now back in the Absarokas I’m awake

to these diffuse corridors of light. The grizzlies

have buried themselves below that light cast down

across the mountain meadow, following a canyon

to the valley floor where the rattlesnakes will also sleep

until mid-April. Meanwhile we’ll travel toward the border

with the birds. The moon is swollen tonight

and the mountain this summer I saw bathed

in a thunderstorm now bathes itself in a mist of snow.

* * *

Rushing, turbulent water and light, convinced by animals

and rivers that nature only leads us to herself,

so openly female through the window of my single eye.

For half a year my alphabet blinded me to beauty,

forgetting my nature which came from the boy lost

comfortably in the woods, how and why he suspected home,

this overmade world where old paths are submerged

in metal and cement.

* * *

This morning in the first clear sunlight making its way

over the mountains, the earth covered with crunchy frost,

I walked the dogs past Weber’s sheep pasture

where a ram was covering a ewe who continued eating,

a wise and experienced woman. I headed due west

up the slope toward Antelope Butte in the delicious

cold still air, turning at the irrigation ditch hearing

the staccato howl of sandhill cranes behind me,

a couple of hundred rising a mile away from Cargill’s

alfalfa, floating up into the white mist rising

from the frost, and moving north in what I judge

is the wrong direction for this weather. Birds make mistakes,

so many dying against windows and phone wires.

I continued west toward the snake den to try to catch

the spirit of the place when it’s asleep, the sheer otherness

of hundreds of rattlesnakes sleeping in a big ball

deep in the rocky earth beneath my feet. The dogs,

having been snake trained, are frightened of this place.

So am I. So much protective malevolence. I fled.

Back home in the studio, a man-made wonder. We planted

a chokecherry tree near the window and now through cream-

colored blinds the precise silhouette of the bare branches,

gently but firmly lifting my head, a Chinese screen

that no one made which I accept from the nature of light.

* * *

I think of Mother’s thicket as her bird garden.

How obsessed she was with these creatures. When I told

her a schizophrenic in Kentucky wrote, “Birds are holes

in heaven through which a man must pass,” her eyes teared.

She lost husband and daughter to the violence of the road

and I see their spirits in the bird garden. On our last night

a few years ago she asked me, “Are we the same species as God?”

At eighty-five she was angry that the New Testament wasn’t fair

to women and then she said, “During the Great Depression

we had plenty to eat,” meaning at the farmhouse,

barn and chicken coop a hundred yards to the north

that are no longer there, disappeared with the inhabitants.

The child is also the mother of the man.

* * *

In the U.P. in the vast place southeast of the river

I found my way home by following the path

where my shadow was the tallest

which led to the trail which led

to another trail which led to the road home

to the cabin where I wrote to her:

“Found two dead redtail hawks, missing

their breasts, doubtless a goshawk took them

as one nests just north of here a half mile

in a tall hemlock on the bend of the river.”

* * *

With only one eye I’ve learned

to celebrate vision, the eye a painter,

the eye a monstrous fleshy camera

which can’t stop itself in the dark

where it sees its private imagination.

The tiny eye that sees the cosmos overhead.

* * *

Last winter I lost heart between each of seven cities.

Planes never land with the same people who boarded.

* * *

Walking Mary and Zilpha every morning I wonder

how many dogs are bound by regret

because they are captured by our imaginations

and affixed there by our need to have them do

as we wish when their hearts are quite otherwise.

* * *

I hope to define my life, whatever is left,

by migrations, south and north with the birds

and far from the metallic fever of clocks,

the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.”

I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river

in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment

of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls,

the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

* * *

Maybe we’re not meant to wake up completely.

I’m trying to think of what I can’t remember.

Last week in France I read that the Ainu in Japan

receive messages from the gods through willow trees

so I’m not the only one. I looked down into the garden

of Matignon and wondered at the car trip the week before

where at twilight in Narbonne 27,000 blackbirds swirled

and that night from the window

it was eerie with a slip of the waning moon

off the right shoulder of the Romanesque cathedral

with Venus sparkling shamelessly above the moon,

Venus over whom the church never had any power.

Who sees? Whose eye is this? A day later in Collioure

from the Hermitage among vineyards in the mountains

I could look down steep canyons still slightly green

from the oaks in November to the startling blue of the Mediterranean,

storm-wracked from the mistral’s seventy knot winds,

huge lumpy white caps, their crests looking toward Africa.

* * *

I always feared losing my remaining eye,

my singular window to the world. When closed it sees

the thousands of conscious photos I’ve taken with it,

impressionist rather than crystalline, from a lion’s mouth

in the Serengeti in 1972 to a whale’s eye in the Humboldt current,

the mountain sun gorged with the color of forest

fires followed by a moon orange as a simple orange,

a thousand girls and women I’ve seen but never met,

the countless birds I adopted since losing the eye in 1945

including an albino grouse creamy as that goshawk’s breast

that came within feet of Mother in our back pasture,

the female trogon that appeared when Dalva

decided to die, and the thousands of books out of whose print

vision is created in the mind’s eye, as real as any garden at dawn.

* * *

No rhapsodies today. Home from France

and the cold wind and a foot of snow have destroyed

my golden window, but then the memory

has always been more vivid than the life. The memory

is the not-quite-living museum of our lives.

Sometimes its doors are insufferably wide open

with black stars in a grey sky, and horses

clattering in and out, our dead animals resting here

and there but often willing to come to life again

to greet us, parents and brothers and sisters sit

at the August table laughing while they eat twelve

fresh vegetables from the garden. Rivers, creeks, lakes

over which birds funnel like massive schools of minnows.

In memory the clocks have drowned themselves, leaving

time to the life spans of trees. The world of our lives

comes unbidden as night.

Jim Harrison