“Poetry, there’s still a bit of the burning bush aspect of poetry descending on you, bang, you know? As they say, you never quite see it coming.” ~ Jim Harrison, from an interview with Jim Lehrer, PBS Newshour (7/9/2009)

“The Dolomites” (before 1912?, pastel on paper)
by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

 

                    

Two for Tuesday: Dealing with loss

Note: I really thought that it was Tuesday when I posted this, but obviously, it was Wednesday. Ignore me.

“The Wind” (1942, gouache, indian ink, and oil on board)
by Hans Hofmann

Today’s post features two very different poems stylistically—Jim Harrison’s prose poem “Cold Wind,” about a desire to go back, and Sally Delehant’s poem about trying to love after loss, “It’s Always Something.”

Cold Wind

I like those old movies where tires and wheels run backwards on
horse-drawn carriages pursued by indians, or Model As driven by
thugs leaning out windows with tommy guns ablaze. Of late I feel a
cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to
the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosqui-
toes, blackf1ies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum
and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I’d slide
into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar,
thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at
thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the
birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our
10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall
back into their arms again.

~ Jim Harrison

                   

“Bride of the Wind” (1914)
by Oskar Kokoschka

I wanted to post the following poem by Sally Delehant, but it was important to keep all of the breaks, so I used the snipping tool and created a jpeg.

                   

Music by Natalie Walker, “Empty Road”

Related articles

• Morning Poem by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser (silverbirchpress.wordpress.com)
• Novellas trace the arc of a life (kansascity.com)
• How I Wrote It: Jim Harrison on “Brown Dog” (omnivoracious.com)

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