I'm going to read something not so quite so heavy here.
It does have a little bit of OK, all right, what can I do,
it's winter, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, this is--
I live in Mount Baldy in Southern California, which
is part of the San Gabriel Mountains.
And Mount Baldy is 10,000 feet tall,
it's one of the tallest mountains in the West.
And it's actually today was a big snowstorm there.
My husband who was coming is trapped.
He couldn't drive to--
couldn't come here tonight because of the snowstorm.
But we have a lot of bears, so we're
surrounded by National Forest, the Angeles National Forest.
And we have a pond, a natural pond, and so in the summer,
bears come.
Sometimes we'll look out and see in the fall too,
and there will be-- because we have trout,
rainbow trout in our pond.
There will be bears in there, who are like,
they need glasses.
They're so nearsighted or something because they're
like, where are the fish?
Where are they?
[LAUGHTER]
They never catch them, they never catch them.
But there they are.
So this is about one of those day, night
actually, evenings when there was a bear in our pond.
"Late November Lament."
Does our 6 foot bear mind getting drenched?
This is what I ask at midnight.
My head throbbing, rain is flinging its tirade
against the panes.
And since Halloween, he's camped under the pond deck,
like some wayward deity coming out
to plop heavily into the cold black waters,
then standing shoulder deep, and swiveling his neck
to catch the flash of trout that we've raised from fingerlings.
Raised not to eat, but to rob the summer
mosquitoes of our flesh.
It's pouring down sheets now, but I can hear him,
lumbering across the planks.
It's not thunder.
The yellow map of India on his chest,
probably shining its strange beacon,
and isn't he a lord of some sort?
Isn't he the wilderness we came to desire,
though not an extra, extra large,
not so roughshod and sour-faced, not reeking of musk
and garbage and brute force.
Something about him makes me happy and sad.
As if his mortal stench could pluck me out of myself
and transform me into a goddess of prophecies.
But that's just my painkillers talking.
As the rain pummels the hungry bear
is stewing sleep, who blinks away
watery streamers as he turns his slurred gaze up
to my lit window.
As he issues sodden grunts into the patter,
and later, loosens a pyramid of steaming shit next
to my poet's bench.
[LAUGHTER]
And he did.
It was like, this will serve you right.
You know, you want to come here and write a poem?
OK, write about that.
[LAUGHTER]
They do stink.
If you get up close to them, they reek.
I mean, it's amazing.
I don't know if you've ever, in Alaska, Peggy,
been close enough to smell how bad bears smell?
OK, of course, they tend to go through garbage
as part of the problem, right?
When they live in neighborhoods, they come,
it's too easy to go raid people's garbage cans
rather than have to forage for the food, berries, and things,
so that's probably partly why they stunk or he stunk.
OK, last poem.
OK, I hope I haven't gone too long.
I haven't been doing very well keeping track.
Am I-- OK, all right.