When the Bear Was Running

When the Bear was Running

You can’t steer a bear, even when your town is on its back. That’s what Grampy says every Wintercall. And then Pop leans back in his chair and replies “But, you can try.” Then we laugh. And I pull the hatches down on our windows to keep out the winds as the bear carrying our town runs. Grampy named them the biting winds, because, “they’ll bite your nose right off. You can laugh, Laurel, but it happened to a lass I knew, the winds whisked her nose right out the window, and she chased it through the streets. She’d probably still be chasing it now, if she hadn’t fallen off the bear’s back.” But Marmee was the only one I’d known who’d fallen off the bear’s back. Seven years ago, now. It was my eighth Wintercall and the bear was running. Our town was all creaks and quivers. Snow bristled in the winds and furied into cruel drifts in the streets. The great trees were all around, and ahead of us—trunks so vast, the bear had to run around them, icicles so long it would take days to slide down them. Everybody else was inside, the hatches on their windows battened down, their tables pushed against their front doors to keep them closed. But Marmee bundled me in a coat so thick I could barely move and led me through the streets. We had to shout to hear each other. The world rushed past, wind-blurred, and we saw a great elk with its hooves wide enough to flatten three houses with one step. “That’s why people moved their towns onto bears,” she said. “And this is why the bears let us.” And with that, she tossed her red braid, whipped a long arrow from her quiver, pulled back her bow and launched it. I watched her arrow hit the elk in its single great eye. It fell. The ground jumped. Snow burst into the winds. “I never miss,” she laughed. “And you’ll be just as good as me, Laurel.” She tossed her braid again and we walked onward, the great trees casting shadows over our town on the bear’s back. She grabbed my hand and snatched me out of the way of a falling pine needle—it was as tall as our home. “Why is the bear running?” I gasped out, my legs weary from keeping my balance. “No one knows. They all do this. Run up here to the deepest cold. You’ll get used to it.” There was a fallen tree ahead and I didn’t think to warn her or to grab on. Then the bear was jumping over it, and Marmee was tossed up into the winds, her hands reaching for me, and then she was gone. “You can’t go out there,” Grampy said, as he placed his gnarled hand on the door. He smelled of pine needles chopped and stewed until they made sour tea. “I’m just going for a walk,” I said. “You think I was born yesterday, Laurel?” He raised his wrinkle-deep eyes to mine. “No, I think you were born when towns were still on the ground,” I tried to joke. He shook his head. No matter how much we laughed, he could never shake the sadness out of his eyes. He took his hand off the door and stepped back. “I’ll be back for dinner,” I said. And then I was out into the biting winds.

The houses about me were just rickety sounds, and beside them, the world was just winds hurtling in my ears. Battling the speeding air, I climbed to the lookout point and I waited, my face stinging so much I thought Grampy’s tale of the snatched nose would come true. I saw the fallen tree and I let go of the walls, took a deep breath, and let myself float up and out into the whirl, out to where my mother fell.

Sara Barnard

When it felt something like a honeymoon

They are not infinite, the world and her treasures. It is not uncounted the gold we can give. World with an end for this has an end. Still, safe in the swarming of a dusty afternoon the gleam is incessant—shine stipples sovereign.

Being not without end, being not without mind you trove me away for our next show of finite. Stowed overhead I would be floor-sprawled remauled, tied in constant opening. Or bed-bound, aground, treasured in your weathering hands.

You turn pirate, claiming captives carelessly. Gleaning wrecks of relished riches past horizon’s silver strip

uncorralled I watch myself walk planks.

Gretchen Rockwell

‘Pay Attention,’ She Says, And I Try

after Mary Oliver

I never liked nature poems, and I laughed at whoever said I might one day learn to love the woods. Then came you and your soft wings and scattered grasses, the redfern where you are

resting, where I am quieted despite myself. Now you’re gone. No light is in the trees today. I find myself writing instead about matter scattered across the stars, how gaseous giants compress diamonds, how

we are all little astronauts floating through the void in tin cans, so lonely, and you tell me I need to pull my eyes back down and look. Look, you say, the bark is peeling off that birch. Underneath that hole in the dirt is a whole world

full of blind baby rabbits, cozy, nestled under the front porch of the house which offers a place to put your helmet down. Look. Mary, I can’t see it like you could, for itself. I won’t shimmy the shed snakeskin of your voice around my neck, desperate to

keep you close. I won’t turn my eyes from the sky, no matter how beautiful your soft hands on your dog, your warbler throat. I live in the space of my imagination; I don’t have your skill for observation. To me every one of the bird-calls

is background. But I want to curl up at the oak leaves of your feet, to close my eyes and let, river-like, your words batter me. I want you to teach me how to be quiet and still, to soak in sunlight like

a stone. Maybe you already have, and I couldn’t see. The proof: I never dreamed I would let myself fly wild. I never dreamed I would have a reason to love the geese.

* This poem is a “Golden Shovel,” a form created by Terrance Hayes in his poem of the same name. In his poem, the end words of each line are taken from the Brooks poem “We Real Cool”; reading down the end of each line in Hayes’ poem reveals the original. Here, I’ve used a selection from Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”