Kingfisher
 a Journal of Northwest Art and Literature

page 2

. . .and lovely choruses funneled out

of hospital chimneys where every room had a field

stone fireplace. Some fishermen learned to walk

on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers,

my flyrod at the ready. Women who wanted love

needed only to wear pig's ear slippers or garlic

 earring. All dogs and people in free concourse

became medium sized and brown, and on  Christmas

everyone won the hundred dollar lottery. God and Jesus

didn't need to come down to earth because they were

already here riding wild  horses every night

and children were allowed to say up late to hear

them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches

with Episcopalians serving Provencal, The Methodists Tuscan,

and so on. In those days, the country was an extra

two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand

miles deep. There were many undiscovered valleys

to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed

though some tribes chose to found new nations

in the heretofore unknown areas between the black

boundary cracks between states. I was married

to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.

Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang

lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly

in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast

to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented

not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.

Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple

fluttering winds that played a kind of chamber music

 in the sky. Pistol barrels grew delphiniums

and everyone was able to select seven days a year

that they were free to repeat but this wasn't a popular

program. In those days the void whirled

with flowers and unknown wild animals attended

country funerals. All the rooftops in cities were flower

and vegetable gardens. The  Hudson River was drinkable

and a humpbacked whale was seen near 42nd Street

pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea,

its voice lifting the steps of people

in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.

I could go on but won't. All my evidence

was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed

on by all the dogs that inhabit memory.

One by one they bark at the sun, moon, and stars

trying to draw them closer again.

Jim Harrison, Off to the Side, pp. 311-13


 

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