There are bears in these dirty hills:
One raided our trash. The long nasty
Scratches on the can told the tale, and
The footprint in the mud with claws.
Even on a man’s own land is he prey:
Black bears are harmless unless
They decide to eat you. Then, they will.
But they almost never do. But
It suits our spirits to be edible,
To surf with sharks or bait these bears.
Anything that eats you is a kind of god,
Christ himself being routinely devoured.
We contemplate this in symbolic form,
A communion of crackers and cabernet,
Scratches on the green plastic can,
Trash all over the space by the shed—
It happened once. It means nothing.
The bear per se will never be back.
His range is the county. His can is full.
But in the new tournament economy
There is no second place; anyone
Who is no winner will not live;
Anyone unwilling to devour himself
Every day—Prometheus, bereft
Of even ravens, forced to pick
His own liver, with his own teeth—
Will neither win, nor even survive.
Such the ethos of the Austrian oak,
Ruthless pleasure in self-destruction,
Sacrifice that makes a carnivore god
In service to civic construction.
The bear, the apex predator,
Is unconscious of all resistance.
In a bear’s mind, he goes where
He wants and does what he wants.
If a bear does not go into a casino
It means he has no urge to gamble.
His will is reality, bounded only
By his sensitive, elegant distaste
Which keeps him, mostly, in the hills.
When the bear is in the yard, when
The bear has its nose in your liver
And is slurping in huge juicy bites,
Remember the papers you signed,
Granting your giblets to the high bid.
At the Sotheby’s auction of the soul
Everyone in a folding chair is a bear,
Waving his paddles and buying meat—
Organ meat, the bear’s favorite food.
The bears are always buying tissue,
Paying with the nation’s best metal,
Meeting like Jesus on the mountaintop
To offer up the cities of the plain—
Just click a box on the DocuSign.
Yes—eaten, you will be—eaten
In purple, with golden ointments
Sprinkled on your beard, buzzing hymns
In your ears—not less are you yourself.
You will be the world in which you walk:
“I was myself the compass of that sea.”
And like everyone else you will vanish,
And unlike most leave yourself behind,
Crowned with nuts and scraps of cloth.
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