Tag: Jim Harrison

Food Poem – Death Again by Jim Harrison

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Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.
Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.
We must think of it as cooking breakfast,
it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl
or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin
after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,
slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard
to accept your last kiss, your last drink,
your last meal about which the condemned
can be quite particular as if there could be
a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers
sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid
lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon
call, and staring into the still, opaque water.
We’ll know as children again all that we are
destined to know, that the water is cold
and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

Jim Harrison, “Death Again” from Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems. from the Writer’s Almanac Podcast, August 14th, 2019

Eating Well = Living Well

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“Let’s all stop a moment in our busy day and return to some eternal verities. It’s quite a mystery, albeit largely unacknowledged, to be alive, and quite simply, in order to remain alive you must keep eating. My notion, scarcely original, is that if you eat badly you are very probably living badly. You tend to eat badly when you become inattentive to all but the immediate economic necessities, real or imagined, and food becomes an abstraction; you merely “fill-up” in the manner that you fill a car with gasoline, no matter that some fey grease slinger has put raspberry puree on your pen-raised venison. You are still a nitwit bent over a trough.”

One of my favorite quotes from:

Jim Harrison, The Raw and The Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand, New York: Grove Press Books, p. 29.

Cover Image from Amazon.com