There's something a little happier.
This is not really a poem about the dawn.
But it does concern a light-- in this case, yeah,
I think a flashlight.
Light has always fascinated me, whether in paintings,
especially out here where the light is so intense.
But this actually is almost a found poem.
It's from a reminiscence.
I can't recall from what conservation magazine,
but one of the recent ones had a story
about a man who was studying bears
and was living in the woods up in Canada.
And the incident in here, although I
added just a little bit to it, is basically the structure
that he used in his little essay.
He was walking in the woods, found a dead moose,
and said, a-ha, there will be a bear
by here eating the moose tonight.
And so he got--
went, ran home, got his flashlight and his thermos
of coffee, and came back and sat up in the tree
to see the bear come in after the sunset.
There's also a reference in here.
Maybe some of you know it.
Afterwards, perhaps you can enlighten me specifically.
I remember about 1959 or so--
somewhere in there-- seeing a Mexican movie.
There's a famous Mexican movie star, or star-ess, in it.
And it was down at the Fox Theater.
Ah, you're all too young to remember the Fox.
And it was very dramatic, as most Mexican movies are.
And she had a broken heart.
And she committed suicide at the end
by walking out into the ocean.
And the surreal thing about it to me
is that as she walked out into the ocean,
her breasts sort of floated ahead of her.
And that image never left me.
Nobody knows who she is?
So, of course, this one is called "Suitcases."
"It was my first July in Canada.
And I found a moose, excuse for reason, putrefying at my feet.
Later, as I sat up in a jack pine
with my field glasses, sandwiches, and a vacuum
flask of coffee, while the mosquitoes snacked on me,
I watched the sun leaving in its wake
a great fire on the horizon.
What was going on over there?
Was that the other land, the London fire where
the merchants ran out in their shirtsleeves,
bug-eyed at the devastation of families,
of irreplaceable libraries?
Or was that place simply California,
where the sun, having left me, was now
leaving, where California girls, pouting,
indolent on the sand all day, now
rose in their striped swimsuits, sphinxes rising excitedly
from the beach, waving their white rubber
arms as they came alive, wading in
after it, as I saw a famous movie star do once,
crazed with her vision, striding out behind her floating breasts
in a Mexican movie?
No matter.
Here, I heard a crashing in the bushes.
Grinning from ear to ear, that wild woman
in the myth coming toward me, dream of stranded geologists,
saw her bend, eat with great snuffling and smacking.
An hour later, saw her better, sitting back against the tree,
legs spread out, asleep in the moon of my flashlight.
Her mouth, a suitcase."