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for Patricia Anderson “To do as Adam did” through the twilight’s fluoride glare Mercury in perihelion (rotating exactly three times while circling the sun twice) to Pluto foot tilt up the slide at either plane and build a Garden of the brain. Internetted eternities, interspersed with cypresses ply ringed air about the many spectacled apples there. Flamestitch niches orb in swivel orb, The Muses thrush at center turning.Phospheros arborescens they sing sense’s struck crystal clarities to knock the knees (or scarlet hollyhock, against a near blue sky). No end of fountains lost among the shrubberies full eye may bare. Fixed stars with fireflies jam the lilac. The Lord is a delicate hammerer. Gold hive upon gray matter He taps synapse (“carrying to”) (“carrying away”) an immense bronze pinecone moon-knit at the end of a vista of sunny jets d’eau, silver poplars. All shivered in a pool. Literally, a flowing: form-take-hand -with-form (That Which Fasteneth Us) pillar to pillar the great dance arch itself through all that is or was or will be, 3/4 time. This will be a glade at the head of one stream and a resonant gnomon before it will stretch regions of signaling gnat-like resiliencies in the atmosphere of where we are — or were. Or will be, when the mingled frame of mind of man is celebration. Gates, which separate the wings of tiered ilex, open in caverns of atoms passing from one into another’s zenith of periodic movement, vast helicoidal shift: a vaulting of arteries beating their heads against the dark. This is the body of light. Vertically in a chromatic spread chord — Elysian elision — J’avais bâti, dans un rêve, un palais, un château ou des grottes

O Tree into the World, Man the chosen Rose out of Chaos: Song Thunder amid held daffodil, the hills of yellow celandine in sudden sun

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away. And remembering ... Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

it lyked to eat salmon w/ its fingers like a bear and then use those fingers to clean its glasses it cried and it looked like a raccoon   I believe it wanted to cultivate this look

Amidst the too much that we buy and throw away and the far too much we wrap it in, the bear found a few items of special interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon, the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back lightly onto his rear paws and slash open a plastic bag, and then his nose— jammed almost with a surfeit of rank and likely information, for he would pause— and then his whole dowsing snout would insinuate itself a little way inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back, trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look around. What a good boy am he. The guardian of the dump was used to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit every which damn way,” he grumbled who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit where the town paid to contain it. The others of us looked and looked. “City folks like you don’t get to see this often,” one year-round resident accused me. Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn to love a rat working a length of subway track. “Nope,” I replied. Just then the bear decamped for the woods with a marl of grease and slather in his mouth and on his snout, picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been cute before, slavering with greed, his weight all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped like a huge, furry pear), but richly fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.

A wild-bear chace, didst never see? Then hast thou lived in vain. Thy richest bump of glorious glee, Lies desert in thy brain. When first my father settled here, ’Twas then the frontier line: The panther’s scream, filled night with fear And bears preyed on the swine. But woe for Bruin’s short lived fun, When rose the squealing cry; Now man and horse, with dog and gun, For vengeance, at him fly. A sound of danger strikes his ear; He gives the breeze a snuff; Away he bounds, with little fear, And seeks the tangled rough . On press his foes, and reach the ground, Where’s left his half munched meal; The dogs, in circles, scent around, And find his fresh made trail. With instant cry, away they dash, And men as fast pursue; O’er logs they leap, through water splash, And shout the brisk halloo. Now to elude the eager pack, Bear shuns the open ground; Through matted vines, he shapes his track And runs it, round and round. The tall fleet cur, with deep-mouthed voice, Now speeds him, as the wind; While half-grown pup, and short-legged fice, Are yelping far behind. And fresh recruits are dropping in To join the merry corps : With yelp and yell,—a mingled din— The woods are in a roar. And round, and round the chace now goes, The world’s alive with fun; Nick Carter’s horse, his rider throws, And more, Hill drops his gun. Now sorely pressed, bear glances back, And lolls his tired tongue; When as, to force him from his track, An ambush on him sprung. Across the glade he sweeps for flight, And fully is in view. The dogs, new-fired, by the sight, Their cry, and speed, renew. The foremost ones, now reach his rear, He turns, they dash away; And circling now, the wrathful bear, They have him full at bay. At top of speed, the horse-men come, All screaming in a row, “Whoop! Take him Tiger. Seize him Drum.” Bang,—bang—the rifles go. And furious now, the dogs he tears, And crushes in his ire, Wheels right and left, and upward rears, With eyes of burning fire. But leaden death is at his heart, Vain all the strength he plies. And, spouting blood from every part, He reels, and sinks, and dies. And now a dinsome clamor rose, ’Bout who should have his skin; Who first draws blood, each hunter knows, This prize must always win. But who did this, and how to trace What’s true from what’s a lie, Like lawyers, in a murder case They stoutly argufy . Aforesaid fice, of blustering mood, Behind, and quite forgot, Just now emerging from the wood, Arrives upon the spot. With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair— Brim full of spunk and wrath, He growls, and seizes on dead bear, And shakes for life and death. And swells as if his skin would tear, And growls and shakes again; And swears, as plain as dog can swear, That he has won the skin. Conceited whelp! we laugh at thee— Nor mind, that now a few Of pompous, two-legged dogs there be, Conceited quite as you.

Tonight the bear comes to the orchard and, balancing on her hind legs, dances under the apple trees, hanging onto their boughs, dragging their branches down to earth. Look again. It is not the bear but some afterimage of her like the car I once saw in the driveway after the last guest had gone. Snow pulls the apple boughs to the ground. Whatever moves in the orchard— heavy, lumbering—is clear as wind. The bear is long gone. Drunk on apples, she banged over the trash cans that fall night, then skidded downstream. By now she must be logged in for the winter. Unless she is choosy. I imagine her as very choosy, sniffing at the huge logs, pawing them, trying each one on for size, but always coming out again. Until tonight. Tonight sap freezes under her skin. Her breath leaves white apples in the air. As she walks she dozes, listening to the sound of axes chopping wood. Somewhere she can never catch up to trees are falling. Chips pile up like snow When she does find it finally, the log draws her in as easily as a forest, and for a while she continues to see, just ahead of her, the moon trapped like a salmon in the ice.

1 In 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-colored and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear. 2 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. 3 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. 4 On the seventh day, living by 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 the narrow-spaced, petty eyes, the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils 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. 5 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. 6 Until one 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 odor 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. 7 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 sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

the bear was born thrown from its side by killer-of-enemies its rage scratched open several rivers and the gulf of mexico an aspect so to speke made fulsomely as it were one whos habitat full somely made reaches all its leaves and feathers to the smoky air a tanager on an elm in oahu really reminded of the grand canyon by the souvenir mug of the muleskinner & the horse & the name angel

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash, a reaction sending out runners across her chest, a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back into fashion, their son coming back from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger spread down the long hallway of their house and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy, the mother decides to see the son again, and so our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth, all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot in this registered historic district (all of the houses bear their stories on a plaque, their first stories, run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon, cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue, in this yard no marker stone and under this stone their son’s everything, no double, no double