1
In late
winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of
steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend down 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,
a 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 inm
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,
and 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?
-- Galway Kinnell