The One About The Bear
Con/Jur/d, 5/4/2024
After reading
our first Frank Stafford poem
in recent memories
still in the smell of graveyard dirt
and blood
you're note on enjoying
the one about the bear, had us
discombobulated, couldn't remember it
couldn't feel it, although
that wet loamy olfactory taste
of a twilight lake, someplace
in the one
big landscape, along route 1
probably the Yukon, before the border
with those gun carriers, prison threateners
big men in small buildings, along a cut
convenience outweighing defensibility
blasted ridges, widened and paved moose and mountain
goat trails
defenders, crazed holy crusaders of a made-up-line
for made up people, invasive communities
playing make believe under the one sun
with often fatal results
we’re hitchhiking, stoned
and the ride bearers, the lonely drifters
out of a trackless desire
savored putting fear
into that East Coast boy, us then
far from home, cold streetlamps, crowd
patrolled streets,
lecturing us about the
grizzlies
about this encounter, this death
that survival, and the lifelong scars,
until
a dull moment
between rides
a road stretches empty
as we watched, a cloud of mosquitoes circle up-turned
thumb
measuring the size of our fellow mountains
all of us alone together
along our respective valleys
the sparking, arcing fear
toe to crown, at the distant brush breaking motion
of a pair of belled horses
as if a bear's charge
would be accompanied
by a metallic ringing and clanging
that night
along that lake, having pulled out the metal flute
post tenting and burying candy bar wrappers
although weeks later, would realize
the toothpaste had been forgotten
in the backpack pillow, we sat
among water smoothed stones a gray granite sand
playing
single notes into
the approaching Solstice midnight, a still
glowing sky with its flashback fringed
aurora borealis
small notes emphasizing the
deeper quiet
now thoughts of traveling
put to bed
abandoned ‘til morning
wondering at belled horses in the middle of nowhere
the vulture’s acreage along the highway
couldn’t help laughing at our pretensions
of ownership
eyes unfocused
staring at the white mounds
on the far shore, knowing
no-human knew our where
and a distant rumble shrinks the large
northern lake to a small intimate pond
as a mound stands up
and stretches
taller than the scrub across the placid waters
with at least 6 other similarly sized hillocks
arranged around the beach, among the insect hum
and the cricket's crick, now there is snoring
after a full body stretch
claws 40 feet high, reaching for the sky
the bear laid back down
Do you remember how we slept that night?
the dreams we had are long forgotten
we remember packing in what at first was a soft rain
putting the tent away, wet
running up the embankment to the curve in the road
where the raindrop distortions
of headlights
rising
made it seem like the sun was
as we were picked up
moving further
from, into deeper
this nomadic story
we call homeMuch Love,
Con/Jur/d, 5/4/2024
