A Song Near the End of the World
Because I suddenly think of the bear—
my head jerks up—doesn’t mean the bear
is near. I was here four months before I saw the bear.
Huge exhausted mammal trudged by the porch—it was the bear
Joe told me Sue had seen while she was picking berries.
Male, five hundred pounds, the bear
was massive in front, and tapered toward the bare
patch on the furred almost curly truculent rear.
Such a hot midsummer, such a tired bear.
He was like a god—so much space was filled with bear.
Like a cumulonimbus come down to earth—a density of bear
with blood in him, and teeth, and a bear
liver and bear
lights. A pirate bear, a private bear, a lone bear,
it may be a father bear, it is a son bear,
a quarantine bear,
doing the essential work of his life—an endangered bear.
We did not share breath—I was behind the window, and the bear
passed on the other side of the porch rails like a bear
passing through bars of sunlight. And bears
are imprisoned now in smaller and smaller wild jails for bears.
When I stand at a bush now and pick a blackberry,
I wonder how the bear
does it, with his teeth or his bear
claws, which in my youth were bear-
mitt pastries, brown sugar embedded with poppy seeds like the dirt and gore in bear
hands—people were eaten by bears
every summer. My favorite part of this bear
was his velvety golden-brown bear
muzzle. Galway and I were mates, in a way—a friendship that could bear
strong hugs. To me, a male—bear
or human—was an unknown, like my husband, like Galway. I bore
many poems by Galway, and he bore
many by me. Was “The Bear”
a boy? I think so. A human being was male, then. A girl bear
might have seemed too much like a mother—what man then could bear
his mother. I think this song is like a mate for Galway’s “Bear.”
A friend at the end of the world—it is barely
known how long we can go on. A wish for the bear:
pleasure, safe cubs born
and yet to be born; ease of bear
mind; bear
heart’s ease, and a dream of a bear
heaven, hills and woods of comb-born honey.
The Bear
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.
And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.
And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.
4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.
I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.
5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.
6
Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?