There is more to life than not
looking back on black fly bites as if
rearranging clouds.
A whistle that wasn’t a bird, twisting
in a finger snap.
That will come later after the woods
bow to the lightning, dripping from electricity.

In the dark
I caught lilac in my throat,
slept with the Milky Way despite
it being too greedy and stuck
in the particulars of what we do every day.

From pages 94-95 of The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand by Jim Harrison (Grove Press, 2001).