And the last poem I'd like to read
is based on the method of hunting bear,
rigged by the Eskimos, in the days before airplanes
took over.
[INAUDIBLE] stopped in the bone and freeze it in a lump of fat
and put it out there for bears along the path.
And when a bear ate such a lump of fat,
his stomach grew fat in his mouth,
and the bone was being opened, he
shot the bear twice in the stomach
and caused him to hemorrhage to death.
And I asked the man who told me this how long would it
take the bear to die.
And he said, oh, days.
In a strong bear, sometimes a week.
And he told me the bear would run all day, all this time,
just run without any set direction,
but just keep running, and moved very fast, day and night.
And, in order to get the bear before the scavengers got it,
you had to follow the trail of blood,
running yourself, day and night, until you got to him.
And I asked him, how do you eat if you--
you couldn't acquire enough food to last for a week,
running day and night.
And he told me what the diet became
after a certain number of days, when you ran out
of food, how you stayed alive.
And it impressed me.
And this story sat with me for, I think, about a year.
And then, one night, I was in Mississippi
and having a sleepless night, and just
got up and wrote the poem out.
And I fixed it up a little bit and [INAUDIBLE]
but, basically, it just came out this way.
And, hopefully, I don't know what it means.
It's called "The Bear."
In late winter, I sometime 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 stinging, enduring odor
of bear.
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 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 of it dragging myself forward
with bear-knives in my fists.
On the third day I begin to starve, at nightfall
I bend down as I knew I would as 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.
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 at 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.
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.
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.
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 big tongue.
And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out, the next one, 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?