Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MARCH WALK, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MARCH WALK, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: I was walking because I wasn't upstairs sitting
Last Line: Waiting for a single apple to tumble from the upmost limb.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Walking


I was walking because I wasn't upstairs sitting.
I could have been looking for pre-1900 gold coins
in the woods all afternoon. What a way to make a living!
The same mastodon was there only three hundred years from
where I last saw him. I felt the sabers on the saber tooth,
the hot wet breath on the back of my hand. Three deer
and a number of crows, how many will remain undisclosed:
It wasn't six and it wasn't thirty. There were four girls
ranging back to 1957. The one before that just arrived
upstairs. There was that long morose trip into the world
hanging onto my skin for a quarter of a mile, shed with some
difficulty. There was one dog, my own, and one grouse
not my own. A strong wind flowed over and through us like
dry water. I kissed a scar on a hip. I found a rotting
crab apple and a distant relative to quartz. You could spend
a lifetime and still not walk to an island. I met none of the
dead today having released them yesterday at three o'clock.
If you're going to make love to a woman you have to give
her some of your heart. Else don't. If I had found a gold coin
I might have left it there with my intermittent interest in
money. The dead snipe wasn't in the same place but the rocks
were. The apple tree was a good place to stand. Every late fall
the deer come there for dessert. They will stand for days
waiting for a single apple to tumble from the upmost limb.





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