My wife died in the autumn.
Now on Saturday morning down here
on the Mexican border my housekeeper,
an Apache Tarahumara woman, sings me a lament
in Spanish of love and death. We were
married fifty-six years, fell in love two years before
that. My soul knows this song she sings.
This so far is a haunting, the bleeding heart
we used to hear about. I’ve been told the heart
will run out of blood but I doubt it.
Lover, come back to me.•
© 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.
