Marching

By Jim Harrison b. 1937 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.

“Marching,” from Jim Harrison’s Saving Daylight (2006) is reprinted by permission of Copper Cayon Press

Source: Saving Daylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)

Biography

Jim Harrison has spent much of his life in Michigan on a farm near where he was born. His connection to rural landscapes is evident in his free-verse, imagistic poetry, which often explores human and animal drives set against an unforgiving natural world. Noting the poetry’s relation to Hemingway’s prose style in a review of Harrison’s Selected & New Poems 1961–1981, poet and critic Richard Tillinghast declared in the New York . . .

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