Jim Harrison died at his desk. The date was March 26, 2016, and he was 78. His body, editor Joseph Bednarik tells us in Complete Poems—a 900-plus-page compendium that gathers all the author’s verse—“was found on the Saturday morning before Easter, notebook opened to a handwritten draft of an untitled poem—the last words of a writer who took his vows as an artist at age nineteen.” I don’t want to read too much into the circumstance; William F. Buckley Jr. also died at his desk, in the middle of writing, so I’m not sure we can define this as a sign of character. Except it is. Imagine Harrison in his study in Patagonia, Arizona, scrawling lines on paper, just as he’d been doing for six decades. “I don’t want to die,” he wrote in his long poem Returning to Earth, published in 1977.
It would certainly
inconvenience my wife and
