Transient
a little rain
the bear passing through town
needs no advice
Poems on the topic: bear
Poems on the topic “bear” on Poets.by.
Abstract
An experiment:
hands talking,
we frighten the bear
back into a book.
The bills of mortality
appear to be full
of pure hunger.
The mother
Right at dusk the mother bear
leads her cubs down to
the edge of the woods
& stops, hearing a screen door
ease open, smelling trouble.
My grossly unequal nose picks up
nothing of her musk or
the sweet milk oozing
from well-bit nipples.
My primate eyes are made for
the colors of day, not shades
of darkness. I peer
into every shadow between the trees,
each clot of night.
The space between us fills
with explosions of breath:
Residual
Thirty years after the sudden death of someone I didn’t know terribly well, what remains? Not his name. Not quite his face, but something of his posture and physique. A strong impression of good-natured and thoughtful conviviality, based on possibly no more than half a dozen conversations, always on the periphery of punk shows. The shock and sadness of his death from a brain tumor. Someone who, on rare occasions when he pops into my head, still makes me smile, and shapes my memory of that whole period in my life. Good times. A good dude.
Wish I remembered his name.
fledgling cuckoo
flopping across the road
adoptive parents
nowhere to be found
poor little rain-crow
didn’t mean to be a parasite
Gummibärchen
what bear
medicine is this
lumpy and vague
as a Zuni fetish stone
chewable as
an eraser
what distant deeps
or skies encapsulated
in what furnace etc.
childhood candy
grown strange
grown up into so much
that’s unbearable
about the bare
necessities of life
Epizoochory
spiderweb
on my glasses
name that tune
lost dog
enchanter’s nightshade burs
in its ears
tick-trefoil reversing
in mid-air
white spears
of black cohosh
an insomniac firefly
waterfall that only sings
when the stream’s a trickle
children’s cries
the holiday sky empty
but for a vulture
Embodied
how infinite is the body
as a field for visions
they are fleet
they are not to be kept
not to command
at night if I go mad
call me up a bear
The Hollow (16)
tree branches grow
no lower than deer can reach
woods’ edge
rock piles
from the 19th century
the oak’s massive crown
right-of-way
the power pole all scratched up
by bears
hayscented fern
losing ground to goldenrod
a circling monarch
Waiting to launch
The first greens
out of the ground are rockets:
dame’s-rocket, garlic mustard,
winter cress where it’s wet.
Then come the wild onions
up at the wood’s edge—
but not yet. I stand watching
a dark spot in the field that fails
to turn into a bear.
Filmstrip
Clouds pull their shadows
across the snow-filled valley
as if dragging for a drowned swimmer.
I watch from the ridge,
mesmerized by the alternation
of gloom and glare.
The No Hunting sign rattles
on the electric pole
above the deep claw-marks of bears.
Kenosis
Mid-January, & the bear
who hasn’t had
a meal in two
months, & won’t for
another three, half-
wakes to chew
sticks into soft
chips—bedding
for the cubs who
will soon be born
& squall
& nurse.
She may leave the den
to eat snow or merely
dream of it.
Her heart beats
Pandora
Pandora was a doll with a plastic head
& a boneless fabric body full of give.
Her eyes were a smiling blue
you scraped with a thumbnail one day
to see what lay beneath: blank plastic.
Pandora was a doll with plastic arms
that could be bent into the semblance
of a hug. From a high perch
she watched the bears multiply
on the bed, expert listeners,
burly avatars of comfort. When
the circus master’s mad wife
came to give them all away
to charity, Pandora alone
with her hopeless eye was spared.
You wept until you couldn’t see
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