The Truro Bear and Other Adventures (2 page)

The bear
    who shuffles
        over the hillsides
            filling himself

with berries
    until his tongue is purple
        (which, remember, is
            a royal color)—

the bear
    who circles the cabin,
        who will not steal the honey,
            who will not rifle the knapsack

of the sleeping camper—
    the one
        who sits by himself
            by the river,

who sings to himself
    the secret song
        no one has ever heard—
            the bear

who yawns
    with the cavernous mouth
        of a shaggy god—
            who, when he sees me

is solidly silent
    and rises
        on the mass of his legs,
            disdainful and free

as anything on earth
    could ever be—
        this is the bear
            I want to see.

The edge of the sea shines and glimmers. The tide rises and falls, on ordinary not on stormy days, about nine feet. The beach here is composed of sand and glacial drift; the many-colored pebbles of this drift have been well rounded by the water’s unceasing, manipulative, glassy touch. In addition, all sorts of objects are carried here by the currents, by the galloping waves, and left as the sea on the outgoing tide tumbles back.

From one tide to the next, and from one year to the next, what do I find here?

Grapefruit, and orange peel, and onion sacks from the fishing boats; balloons of all colors, with ribbons dangling; beer cans, soft drink cans, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic bottle caps, feminine hygiene by-products, a few summers ago several hypodermic needles, the odd glove and the odd shoe, plastic glasses, old cigarette lighters, mustard bottles, plastic containers still holding the decomposing bodies of baitfish; fishhooks rusty or still shining, coils of fishline; balls of fishline, one with a razor-billed auk in a death-grip.

Sea clams, razor clams, mussels holding on with their long beards to stones or each other; a very occasional old oyster and quahog shell; other shells in varying degrees of whiteness: drills, whelks, jingles, slippers, periwinkles, moon snails. Bones of fish, bodies of fish and of skates, pipefish, goosefish, jellyfish, dogfish, starfish, sand dabs; blues or parts of blues or the pink, satiny guts of blues; sand eels in the blackened seaweed, silver, and spackled with salt.

Dead harbor seal, dead gull, dead merganser, dead gannet with tiny ivory-colored lice crawling over its snowy head and around its aster-blue eyes. Dead dovekie in winter.

Once, on a summer morning at exact low tide, the skull of a dolphin at the edge of the water. Later the flanged backbone, tail bones, hip bones slide onto the sand and return no more to the gardens of the sea.

One set of car keys. One quarter, green and salt-pocked.

Egg case of the left-handed whelk, black egg cases of skates; sea lace, the sandy nests of the moon snail, not one without its break in the circle; once, after a windy night, a drenched sea mouse.

More gorgeous than anything the mind of man has yet or ever will imagine, a moth,
Hyalophora cecropia,
in the first morning of its long death. I think of Thoreau’s description of one he found in the Concord woods: “it looked like a young emperor just donning the most splendid robes that ever emperor wore ….” The wings are six inches across, and no part of them is without an extraordinary elaboration of design—swirls, circles, and lines, brief and shaped like lightning. Upon its taut understructure, the wings are powdery and hairy, like the finest fur closely shorn. White and cream and black, and a silver-blue, wine red and rust red, a light brown here and a darker brown there and still a deeper brown elsewhere, not to speak of the snowy white of the body’s cylinder, and the stripes of the body, and the red fringe of the body, and the rust-colored legs, and the black plumes of the antennae. Once it was the hungry green worm. Then it flew, through the bottleneck of the deepest sleep, through the nets of the wind, into the warm field. And now it is the bright trash of the past, its emptiness perfect, and terrible.

The darkest thing
met me in the dark.
It was only a face
and a brace of teeth
that held no words,
though I felt a salty breath
sighing in my direction.
Once, in an autumn that is long gone,
I was down on my knees
in the cranberry bog
and heard, in that lonely place,
two voices coming down the hill,
and I was thrilled
to be granted this secret,
that the coyotes, walking together
can talk together,
for I thought, what else could it be?
And even though what emerged
were two young women, two-legged for sure
and not at all aware of me,
their nimble, young women tongues
telling and answering,
and though I knew
I had believed something probably not true,
yet it was wonderful
to have believed it.
And it has stayed with me
as a present once given is forever given.
Easy and happy they sounded,
those two maidens of the wilderness
from which we have—
who knows to what furious, pitiful extent—
banished ourselves.

Now I see it—
it nudges with its bulldog head
the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;
and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal

who is leading her soft children
from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps
close to the edge
and they follow closely, the good children—

the tender children,
the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet
into the darkness.
And now will come—I can count on it—the murky splash,

the certain victory
of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic
circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks
flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

will be most mournful
on their account. But, listen,
what’s important?
Nothing’s important

except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,
of which this is a part,
not be denied. Once,
I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along—
a snapper—
broken out I suppose from some backyard cage—
and I knew what I had to do—

I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it—
I put it, like a small mountain range,
into a knapsack, and I took it out
of the city, and I let it

down into the dark pond, into
the cool water,
and the light of the lilies,
to live.

Consider the other kingdoms. The
trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding
titles: oak, aspen, willow.
Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north
have dozens of words to describe its
different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their
thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their
infallible sense of what their lives
are meant to be. Thus the world
grows rich, grows wild, and you too,
grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too
were born to be.

I am watching otter, how he
    plays in the water, how he
        displays brave underside to the
            wave-washings, how he

breathes in descent trailing sudden
    strings of pearls that tell
        almost, but never quite, where he is
            apt to rise—how he is

gone, gone, so long I despair of him, then he
    trims, wetly, up the far shore and if he
        looks back he is surely
            laughing. I too have taken

my self into this
    summer lake, where the leaves of the trees
        almost touch, where peace comes
            in the generosity of water, and I have

reached out into the loveliness and I have
    floated on my flat back to think out
        a poem or two, not by any means fluid but,
            dear God, as you have made me, my only quickness.

I startled a young black snake: he
flew over the grass and hid his face

under a leaf, the rest of him in plain sight.
Little brother, often I’ve done the same.

I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something
    has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.

Off Stellwagen
off the Cape,
the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
    of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.

They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.

Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.

We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash through the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky—
like nothing you’ve ever imagined—
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then

they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.

I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.

I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living.

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.