My Little Poem: a sackful of red apples

"Carpe Diem" by Jim Harrison

Hello, Poetry Friend

Next week I will be sharing a Ted Kooser poem I learned by heart, but first, a Jim Harrison one, because the two poets were good friends. I knew exactly which Harrison poem I wanted to memorize, but I couldn't remember the title. Simply Googling "Jim Harrison poem convertible" brought this one right up. It's a poem for long love — in this case, love of 50 years.

Carpe Diem

Night and day
seize the day, also the night —
a handful of water to grasp.
The moon shines off the mountain
snow where grizzlies look for a place
for the winter’s sleep and birth.
I just ate the year’s last tomato
in the year’s fatal whirl.
This is mid-October, apple time.
I picked them for years.
One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels.
It was the birth of love that year.
Sometimes we live without noticing it.
Overtrying makes it harder.
I fell down through the tree grabbing
branches to slow the fall, got the afternoon off.
We drove her aqua Ford convertible into the country
with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect
day with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves
into the future together seizing the day.
Fifty years later we hold each other looking
out the windows at birds, making dinner,
a life to live day after day, a life of
dogs and children and the far wide country
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains.
So far the days keep coming.
Seize the day gently as if you loved her.

–Jim Harrison

Even though I've been married almost 32 years, I don't write a lot of love poetry, (although I’ve been writing more lately). This poem says everything I haven’t words for.

It begins and ends with what is likely the closing of the lives and therefore the love of these two people. In the middle of the poem is the glorious day when they fell in love "together." The poem leaves out the in between — the mess, the misunderstandings, the shouts, the tears. I like that about it. Harrison is all about moonlight on mountain snow, "the year's last tomato," and (be still my heart) that "sack of red apples." Our man fell out of a tree, fell in love, and is close to falling asleep for good.

The word "look" is repeated at the beginning and ending of the poem. At the beginning the grizzlies "look for a place / for the winter's sleep" and at the end the man and woman are holding each other and "looking / out the windows at birds."

The season is about to change. This is the time of "the year's fatal whirl." But oh! What a whirl it has been!

What is there to do with such beauty? Seize it. Gently.

May 26

Hey, fellow grizzly. 
It is almost exactly 35 years since we line-danced on the tennis courts at camp. 
Since then — many bridges, much water. 
Come, I have a sack of Fujis. Let’s get rumpled. 
My only regret is that you sold your Miata. 

– Megan Willome

Poetry Journal

• Read Harrison’s poem aloud. Read it aloud again.

• What images do you like? What images from your love relationship might you want to emphasize?

• You are your love … you two are [insert animal here].

• Write your own love poem. If you like, email me what you write.

Happy poeming!

Megan