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.
You can find this poem in Jim Harrison’s fantastic book — Dead Man’s Float. © Copper Canyon Press, 2016
That final line!
I liked your poem. My wife and I have been together for 45 years -- living, working, sharing in unity, growing old together. Your poem brought back memories of picking broccoli that was frozen crisp in the September snow of Alaska.