So this afternoon, I had a little discussion session
with a number of students at the Poetry Center.
And one person there asked me to read a poem
that I had read after the tennis tournament in 1978.
So I said I would.
It's called "The Bear" and I used to read it quite a lot.
And I think I imprinted it on my memory,
so I believe I can say it now.
But I may have to open the book and start again
if I get into trouble.
Do you want to sit down somewhere?
Plenty of seats.
Well, I have to find out how it begins and then I think--
[LAUGHTER]
Line two, thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, if I had as good a memory as you, I would relate to it.
Well, I'll hold it open here in case.
[LAUGHTER]
"The Bear."
"In late winter, I sometimes glimpse
spits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow,
and bend close and see it as lung-colored,
and put down my nose and know the chilly 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 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.
On the third day, I begin to starve.
At nightfall, I bent down as I knew I would at a turd
supped 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 strangled steamy hulk, the heavy fur rippling in the wind.
I come up to him and stare at the narrow-spaced petty eyes,
the dismayed face laid back on a shoulder, the nostrils flared,
catching perhaps the first taint of me as he died.
And 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 flat footed 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 bare transcendence, which
dance of solitude I attempt, which gravity clutched
leap, which trudge, which groan.
Until one day, I tatter and fall,
fall on the 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 a screech until I think I must rise up and dance.
And I lie still.
I awaken.
I think marsh lights 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.
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?"
[CLAPPING]