Weekly Poem: ‘Barking’

By Jim Harrison

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

Jim Harrison has published more than 30 collections of poetry and prose. “In Search of Small Gods” is his twelfth book of poems. 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. His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. He has been poetry editor of “The Nation” has also served as the food columnist for the magazines Smart and Esquire. For more about Harrison, visit our Poetry Series.