The Bear Hunters \ Burning The Barren Ground

Alan: As a non-hunter, it took me awhile to notice that hunting, around here, is an essentially social act.

The Bear Hunters

The man in the bear suit

lies at full stretch beside the road

on his side, with his nose in weeds,

one hand twisted under,

his broad feet splayed

while the man in plaid flannel

bends and prepares to insert

and twist the tag

and start to cut open

the belly.

Other men, a handful, stand around

aimlessly, wanting to be part of

the scene, to not have business

elsewhere,

an inconsequential back road

taking on, for a few minutes

through their attentiveness and witness

an air of drama or at the least

tableau.

Pickup trucks, six or seven,

line the gravel, two with drivers still

at the wheels

as if watching

a drive-in movie.

There is something almost pinched

about their eagerness

as if they feel a gnawing

in the gut.

Only the man at work

and the bear, who has an expression

of something that has not yet got used

to being dead,

look unhungry.

There are traditions

in which it is said that hunters

return in their next lives

as what they have killed, when,

not remembering exactly,

but having a sort of fading image

of what they were before,

they are drawn, curious, or careless,

to the very places of danger

and the men who now hunt them,

and so are killed, in a sense,

at their own hands or, as good as,

hands like those they once had.

Whether or not this is true

there is, on the faces of the men at the roadside,

something enough like a bear’s insatiable hard stare

that it might be possible to think

they could almost be wondering

when the one who has now commenced skinning

will finish,

pull on the thick black pelt

and take off running

into the woods.

Nancy: Hundreds and hundreds of acres of rolling, stony uplands left by the glacier and now covered with Maine blueberries.  It all gets burned every other year.

Burning The Barren Ground

Yesterday,

fire running everywhere

men whipping it on, their magic

out in the Phoenix gardens

fire all day

veins of fire running out in the dusk

dying between the stones

What if the women made magic?

Never told anyone?

Today, raining

the fields all sard and onyx after the burn

wet, shining

too early yet for a rising

just stony black fields

naked red stems

silver veins of rain

“Burning The Barren Ground” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

The Translator \ Ghost Image

Alan: All writing seems an act of translation, as deep reading is a hope to be translated.

The Translator

She sat next to me, reading

La Neige Tombant Sur Les Cèdres

the whole flight, east coast to Seattle,

except for a meal, a nap or two,

her book filling the dry cabin

high, high above the parched nation

with mystery, with green and solemn light.

I felt then the cedars I was leaving

and those toward which I was passing,

how cool they would be, even in summer,

and how in winter the snow off Fundy

or Puget Sound would hold the half-light steady

in its moist fingers, weaving a story, the same and not the same,

among the branches over my upturned face.

Nancy: I feared neither man nor beast when Folly was with me.  And she would be with me, even if it meant bending the bars we’d put on the pickup cap.

Ghost Image

for Folly

The black dog falls out of the drawer

in casual parts, as she wandered through photographs

which were not meant to be photographs of dogs

but of gardens, or friends, or of the north Atlantic.

Missing the dog is much the same.  Bits of dog

scattered all through our landscapes take us by surprise.

I must have thousands of images latent: see how she runs

in the shadow of a bird, black on snow, caught

in the act of quick grace.

There’s no weighting her down with a stone,

this dog who has gone everywhere.

“The Translator” first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.  “Ghost Image” first appeared in East of the Light (Stone Man Press & Slow Dancer Press, 1984).

Water-Rock Poem \ Eighteen Strangers Are Bused In To A Poetry Workshop

Alan: How we live seems normal to us, but not, apparently, to most.  This poem sums it up – with a nod to Han Shan, whose own poems were found, after he vanished, on rocks and trees.

Water-Rock Poem

When you challenged the incumbent,

we were “hippies that ran around in the woods naked smoking dope.”

When you went downstate to read,

you overheard in the ladies’ room that you

“didn’t smell” the way she “thought you would.”

My father, tapping the inside wall

that was also the outside wall,

pronounced our situation “marginal.”

My mother fretted and fretted

until we finally got a phone,

although for a long time

it was under the stairs

in an unused house

ten miles off.

Still, we have been here over thirty years

together, living our poems,

painting them on rocks,

the bark of old trees,

in water,

in rain that blows in

from the east,

sun that blows in

from the west.

Nancy: “Enrichment,” or a day out of school, a better-than-school-buffet lunch and a folder full of handouts.  Or perhaps, sometimes, a spark that lights a fire? 

Eighteen Strangers Are Bused In To A Poetry Workshop

Her boyfriend’s twenty-five, she’s

  ten years younger.

This is a poetry workshop, I only learn

  about her two-year old (girl? boy?)

And we’re off to another town, another affair

  of the heart.

The stories pour out in poems, a lot

  of love, a lot (stifled, distanced) of anger.

It’s ok, I tell them.  Be honest.  You have

  a right to that, poems are no place

To be polite.

The girls bounce off one another’s poems

  as though they were trampolines.

They have so much to say.

The boys sit with their shoe soles up

  and out, I see their faces

Distant, behind tread patterns and logos.

One of the girls leaves the trampoline,

  she’s talking about guns.

Nobody has written about guns.  The boys

  come alive, feet back, heads forward.

Everyone talks at once.

About fights.  About community (they don’t use

  that word), about the towns

Where school buses are stoned after basketball games,

  about the car full of kids

Trying to run down the soccer player.

About the kid who was shot.  How he was

  everyone’s friend.

About grief, and fear.

I know that across the hall they’re hearing

  about proofreading and punctuation.

It’s ok, I say, the hour is up

  but remember, you have stories

For one another, you have the right

  to write it as you see it.

I get a last word from the girl

  with the child: a sigh,

“When I get home – it’s Friday –

  by the time I get home,

Half of my class will already be drunk.”

“Eighteen Strangers Are Bused In To A Poetry Workshop” first appeared in Slow Dancer magazine.

Released \ Yearly Event

Alan: In the fall, the white-footed mice come into the house, seeking warmth and crumbs.  Until I found a reliable live-trap, I would set snap-traps before bed, then lie awake waiting – and not wanting – to hear the snap.

Released

I release the trap,

dropping the dead mouse

at the edge of the clearing

where it will be found

by a crow or fox.

I release the trap,

dropping the mouse

that was too quick

and so is maimed

with one eye bulging and milky

and a crushed jaw

but is not yet dead

next to the house

where it takes a sideways hop

and sits curled on itself

in the frost.

Ah, mice!

The sun strikes

the big spruce tree

shaped like a pagoda.

Nancy: Deer season, and all the talk is pounds and antlers (“racks”); time for bragging rights, show and tell and mincemeat pies with venison.

Yearly Event

It may well be the biggest buck

in town, feet out one side of the trunk,

head wedged, rack well displayed

out the other.

It’s on tour.  Casual.  Just happened the wife

needed milk from Buddy’s store.

Everybody needs something from Buddy’s store;

there’s a parade of pickups.

That deer’s going to just happen

to stop a dozen times today.  Every time

it’s like honey; men cluster around the trunk.

Sometimes they touch the deer.

The way they hang deer here

is on ladders, leaned up against the porch.

They hang them by the front door.  This week

the town is full of deer driving around,

and men counting points, keeping score.