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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