The Bear

In the late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-coloured
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly,enduring odour of bear.

I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
adn 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 on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fist.

On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at 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 on 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
and stare at hte narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nsotrils
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 on 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 odour 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 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 stick infusion, that rank flavour of blood, 
that poetry, by which I lived?

By Galway Kinnell

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