For Celeste and Robert Klein
Our bear, we call him now.
Ursus minor, pure in his hole
etrayed by yellow snow
and a melted patch of scat
around the ash tree’s bole.
Likely ousted just last fall
to make way for the new crop.
Denned up all winter on your scarp
he’s come out periodically,
taken three steps to pee,
gone up the canted trunk
and stretched, like a basketball dunker.
Higher claw marks every week
attest to his improved physique.
In order to lean in and touch
his black moth-eaten laprobe fur,
in order to feel his lean flanks twitch
under our palms, we four vigil keepers
each Sunday climbed a slope so steep
we seized handholds on saplings to
underwrite our view.
We whispered over him, as if
his trance were sacred to this cliff.
As if these watchdays might compare
with other vigils of our lives—
the Sixties’ civil rights sit-ins.
The lyings down against the war.
Peacewalks to halt the bomb. Believe
me, bear’s the merest rung we’ve
stepped on climbing Jacob’s ladder.
Now let us live in harmony
with every breathing thing,
the church exhales. Our horse manure
beds your garden, half your pig’s
in our freezer. The children,
all grown and scattered, cross
time zones now and then to visit,
victims of the oldest feelings
that nothing changes, everything is broken.
So be it. For years we’ve lugged
back and forth the same unopened jug
of sour red Chianti, token
that we’re each other’s home-and-home.
Earlier today we bought
four market lambs to fatten
and dress out next November,
held them up, floppy as pillow ticks,
for the elastrator
and stayed to smile at two bummers,
orphans high on their four-hour fix
of milk replacer, skidding among
the kitchen chairs with the farmer’s mongrel.
Outside, the laying hens no longer
laying will have their necks wrung.
Everything pays for growing tame,
whatever you call it. Our forebears,
those good gray Victorians,
caged wild birds and blinded them
with hot needles. It was thought
that this would make them sing.
We castrate what we plan to eat
to purge the musk from the meat.
He made their shining colors
and He made their tiny wings.
We settle our accounts and go,
the four of us clumsier now
plodding through rotten snow,
rising toward our bear
to put the wilderness back in.
Each pilgrimage we make
I hope to find our avatar
cranky, thin, waked
by the calendar,
vanished from the body of the tree.
Today, at last. Something we watched,
touched, and let be.
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