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Painting: "Sky Rider" -2009- by Carolyn Coalson
Marching
by
Jim Harrison
At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.
*Jim
Harrison* (born
December 11, 1937), is an American author known for his poetry,
fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. He has been
called "a force of nature,"
and his work has been compared to that of Faulkner and Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and have retained
some of the best of an agrarian pioneer ancestry by dint of their
intelligence and some formal education. They have attuned themselves
to the best of the natural and civilized worlds, surrounded by
excesses but determined to live their lives as well as possible.
Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely
populated regions of North America with many stories set in places
such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona-Mexico
border.
He currently divides his residence, living in both Patagonia, Arizona and Livingston, Montana.
Source: Wikipedia
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