The Old Days

par Jim Harrison

Pastel par Jean-Marc Gomis

Parution du poème le 21 janvier 2001 dans Le New York Times

In the old days it stayed light until midnight
and rain and snow came up from the ground
rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.

Every time you'd see one, two more would appear,
walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.

Money didn't grow in the leaves of trees but around
the trunks in calf's leather money belts
though you could only take twenty bucks a day.

Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran
up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women
were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri
faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis
could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.

A few political leaders were executed for betraying
the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon
of Burgundy a day.

People only died on one day a year and lovely choruses funneled out of hospital chimneys where every room had a field stone fireplace.

Some fishermen learned to walk on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers, my flyrod at the ready.

Women who wanted love needed only to wear pig's ear slippers or garlic earrings.

All dogs and people in free concourse became medium sized and brown, and on Christmas everyone won the hundred dollar lottery.

God and Jesus didn't need to come down to earth because they were already here riding wild horses every night and children were allowed to stay up late to hear
them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches
with Episcopalians serving Provencial, the Methodists Tuscan, and so on

In those days the country was an extra two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand miles deep.

There were many undiscovered valleys to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed though some tribes chose to found new nations in the heretofore unknown areas between the black boundary cracks between states.

I was married to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.

Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang
lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly
in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented
not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.

Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple
fluttering wings that played a kind of chamber music
in the sky.

Pistol barrels grew delphiniums and everyone was able to select seven days a year they were free to repeat but this wasn't a popular program. In those days the void whirled with flowers and unknown wild animals attended
country funerals.

All the rooftops in cities were flower and vegetable gardens.

The Hudson River was drinkable and a humpback whale was seen near the 42nd Street pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea, its voice lifting the steps of people
in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.
I could go on but won't.

All my evidence was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed on by all the dogs that inhabit memory.

One by one they bark at the sun, moon and stars
trying to draw them closer again.

Jim Harrison