The One About The Bear

5/4/2024 (Delayed heading to camp until tomorrow)

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 home

Much Love,

Con/Jur/d, 5/4/2024