Mother Night

When you wake at three AM you don't think of your age or sex and rarely your name or the plot of your life which has never broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension wherein the galaxies make more sense than your job or the government.
Jesus at the well with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid than your car. You can clearly see the bear climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's story no one ever wrote.
Your childhood horse named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said,
"If you want to understand mortality look at birds."
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

from Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison

From Booklist
Harrison's poetry is earthy in the fullest sense of the word: it is of the earth, stoked by the senses, in sync with the beat of life, and salty in its forthrightness. Harrison gleans lessons from rivers, the moon, birds, and dogs, and puzzles over the elusive nature of time, tagging clocks as "the machinery of dread." He writes sharply of war, the "loathsome" government, the distortions of religion, and humankind's "will toward greed and self-destruction." A veteran fiction writer, Hollywood darling, hard-living and deep-thinking poet, Harrison brings tough love to the puzzles of existence and a meditative perspective to life's mysteries as he evokes the wilds of Montana and cherished small towns. He remembers the dead, savors life's bittersweetness, its push and pull, its "swish and swash," and knows in his very cells that "salvation isn't coming. It's always been here." Harrison may be under doctor's orders to count his drinks and measure the sugar in his blood, but this is his most robust, sure-footed, and spirit-raising poetry collection to date. Donna Seaman
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