I have studied and become intimate
with the speed of darkness. It’s so fast
it’s always here. When the light withdraws
the dark comes from no place. It always lives
with us. Your heart and brain are black.
They never see the true light except in violence
or autopsy. Of course the brain can cast
its own blinding light that we wait for in a poem,
at least blinding to us. In our trances, the loves
of long ago enter the room unescorted, silent
perhaps from the black bottom of the ocean
where we all die in perfect darkness, a sense
of whirling that recedes back to the time
the ocean swallowed the smallest stars
then heated us into our early life.
Darkness is always there, it only stands revealed.•
© 2021 James T. Harrison Trust. Excerpted from Jim Harrison: Complete Poems, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on October 26, 2021.
This poem appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Alta Journal.
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Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the bestselling author of nearly 40 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is widely credited with reviving the novella form with the publication of Legends of the Fall. His work has been translated into two dozen languages, produced as four feature-length films, and a biography and documentary film about Harrison are forthcoming.
