The Truro Bear and Other Adventures Read online

  One set of car keys. One quarter, green and salt-pocked.

  Egg case of the left-handed whelk, black egg cases of skates; sea lace, the sandy nests of the moon snail, not one without its break in the circle; once, after a windy night, a drenched sea mouse.

  More gorgeous than anything the mind of man has yet or ever will imagine, a moth, Hyalophora cecropia, in the first morning of its long death. I think of Thoreau’s description of one he found in the Concord woods: “it looked like a young emperor just donning the most splendid robes that ever emperor wore ….” The wings are six inches across, and no part of them is without an extraordinary elaboration of design—swirls, circles, and lines, brief and shaped like lightning. Upon its taut understructure, the wings are powdery and hairy, like the finest fur closely shorn. White and cream and black, and a silver-blue, wine red and rust red, a light brown here and a darker brown there and still a deeper brown elsewhere, not to speak of the snowy white of the body’s cylinder, and the stripes of the body, and the red fringe of the body, and the rust-colored legs, and the black plumes of the antennae. Once it was the hungry green worm. Then it flew, through the bottleneck of the deepest sleep, through the nets of the wind, into the warm field. And now it is the bright trash of the past, its emptiness perfect, and terrible.

  Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered

  The darkest thing

  met me in the dark.

  It was only a face

  and a brace of teeth

  that held no words,

  though I felt a salty breath

  sighing in my direction.

  Once, in an autumn that is long gone,

  I was down on my knees

  in the cranberry bog

  and heard, in that lonely place,

  two voices coming down the hill,

  and I was thrilled

  to be granted this secret,

  that the coyotes, walking together

  can talk together,

  for I thought, what else could it be?

  And even though what emerged

  were two young women, two-legged for sure

  and not at all aware of me,

  their nimble, young women tongues

  telling and answering,

  and though I knew

  I had believed something probably not true,

  yet it was wonderful

  to have believed it.

  And it has stayed with me

  as a present once given is forever given.

  Easy and happy they sounded,

  those two maidens of the wilderness

  from which we have—

  who knows to what furious, pitiful extent—

  banished ourselves.

  Turtle

  Now I see it—

  it nudges with its bulldog head

  the slippery stems of the lilies, making them tremble;

  and now it noses along in the wake of the little brown teal

  who is leading her soft children

  from one side of the pond to the other; she keeps

  close to the edge

  and they follow closely, the good children—

  the tender children,

  the sweet children, dangling their pretty feet

  into the darkness.

  And now will come—I can count on it—the murky splash,

  the certain victory

  of that pink and gassy mouth, and the frantic

  circling of the hen while the rest of the chicks

  flare away over the water and into the reeds, and my heart

  will be most mournful

  on their account. But, listen,

  what’s important?

  Nothing’s important

  except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,

  of which this is a part,

  not be denied. Once,

  I happened to see, on a city street, in summer,

  a dusty, fouled turtle plodding along—

  a snapper—

  broken out I suppose from some backyard cage—

  and I knew what I had to do—

  I looked it right in the eyes, and I caught it—

  I put it, like a small mountain range,

  into a knapsack, and I took it out

  of the city, and I let it

  down into the dark pond, into

  the cool water,

  and the light of the lilies,

  to live.

  The Other Kingdoms

  Consider the other kingdoms. The

  trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding

  titles: oak, aspen, willow.

  Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north

  have dozens of words to describe its

  different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their

  thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their

  infallible sense of what their lives

  are meant to be. Thus the world

  grows rich, grows wild, and you too,

  grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

  were born to be.

  Swimming with Otter

  I am watching otter, how he

  plays in the water, how he

  displays brave underside to the

  wave-washings, how he

  breathes in descent trailing sudden

  strings of pearls that tell

  almost, but never quite, where he is

  apt to rise—how he is

  gone, gone, so long I despair of him, then he

  trims, wetly, up the far shore and if he

  looks back he is surely

  laughing. I too have taken

  my self into this

  summer lake, where the leaves of the trees

  almost touch, where peace comes

  in the generosity of water, and I have

  reached out into the loveliness and I have

  floated on my flat back to think out

  a poem or two, not by any means fluid but,

  dear God, as you have made me, my only quickness.

  Black Snake

  I startled a young black snake: he

  flew over the grass and hid his face

  under a leaf, the rest of him in plain sight.

  Little brother, often I’ve done the same.

  Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

  I’d seen

  their hoofprints in the deep

  needles and knew

  they ended the long night

  under the pines, walking

  like two mute

  and beautiful women toward

  the deeper woods, so I

  got up in the dark and

  went there. They came

  slowly down the hill

  and looked at me sitting under

  the blue trees, shyly

  they stepped

  closer and stared

  from under their thick lashes and even

  nibbled some damp

  tassels of weeds. This

  is not a poem about a dream,

  though it could be.

  This is a poem about the world

  that is ours, or could be.

  Finally

  one of them—I swear it!—

  would have come to my arms.

  But the other

  stamped sharp hoof in the

  pine needles like

  the tap of sanity,

  and they went off together through

  the trees. When I woke

  I was alone,

  I was thinking:

  so this is how you swim inward,

  so this is how you flow outward,

  so this is how you pray.

  Humpbacks

  There is, all around us,

  this country

  of original fire.

  You know what I mean.

  The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something

  has to be holding

  our bodies

  in its rich and
timeless stables or else

  we would fly away.

  Off Stellwagen

  off the Cape,

  the humpbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage

  of barnacles and joy

  they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it

  like children

  at play.

  They sing, too.

  And not for any reason

  you can’t imagine.

  Three of them

  rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,

  then dive

  deeply, their huge scarred flukes

  tipped to the air.

  We wait, not knowing

  just where it will happen; suddenly

  they smash through the surface, someone begins

  shouting for joy and you realize

  it is yourself as they surge

  upward and you see for the first time

  how huge they are, as they breach,

  and dive, and breach again

  through the shining blue flowers

  of the split water and you see them

  for some unbelievable

  part of a moment against the sky—

  like nothing you’ve ever imagined—

  like the myth of the fifth morning galloping

  out of darkness, pouring

  heavenward, spinning; then

  they crash back under those black silks

  and we all fall back

  together into that wet fire, you

  know what I mean.

  I know a captain who has seen them

  playing with seaweed, swimming

  through the green islands, tossing

  the slippery branches into the air.

  I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever

  she can, and nudge it gently along the bow

  with her long flipper.

  I know several lives worth living.

  Listen, whatever it is you try

  to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you

  like the dreams of your body,

  its spirit

  longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

  toss their dark mane and hurry

  back into the fields of glittering fire

  where everything,

  even the great whale,

  throbs with song.

  Moles

  Under the leaves, under

  the first loose

  levels of earth

  they’re there—quick

  as beetles, blind

  as bats, shy

  as hares but seen

  less than these—

  traveling

  among the pale girders

  of appleroot,

  rockshelf, nests

  of insects and black

  pastures of bulbs

  peppery and packed full

  of the sweetest food:

  spring flowers.

  Field after field

  you can see the traceries

  of their long

  lonely walks, then

  the rains blur

  even this frail

  hint of them—

  so excitable,

  so plush,

  so willing to continue

  generation after generation

  accomplishing nothing

  but their brief physical lives

  as they live and die,

  pushing and shoving

  with their stubborn muzzles against

  the whole earth,

  finding it

  delicious.

  The Snow Cricket

  Just beyond the leaves and the white faces

  of the lilies,

  I saw the wings

  of the green snow cricket

  as it went flying

  from vine to vine,

  searching, then finding a shadowed place in which

  to sit and sing—

  and by singing I mean, in this instance,

  not just the work of the little mouth-cave,

  but of every enfoldment of the body—

  a singing that has no words

  or a single bar of music

  or anything more, in fact, than one repeated

  rippling phrase

  built of loneliness

  and its consequences: longing

  and hope.

  Pale and humped,

  the snow cricket sat all evening

  in a leafy hut, in the honeysuckle.

  It was trembling

  with the force

  of its crying out,

  and in truth I couldn’t wait to see if another would come to it

  for fear that it wouldn’t,

  and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  I wished it good luck, with all my heart,

  and went back over the lawn, to where the lilies were standing

  on their calm, cob feet,

  each in the ease

  of a single, waxy body

  breathing contentedly in the chill night air;

  and I swear I pitied them, as I looked down

  into the theater of their perfect faces—

  that frozen, bottomless glare.

  Whelks

  Here are the perfect

  fans of the scallops,

  quahogs, and weedy mussels

  still holding their orange fruit—

  and here are the whelks—

  whirlwinds,

  each the size of a fist,

  but always cracked and broken—

  clearly they have been traveling

  under the sky-blue waves

  for a long time.

  All my life

  I have been restless—

  I have felt there is something

  more wonderful than gloss—

  than wholeness—

  than staying at home.

  I have not been sure what it is.

  But every morning on the wide shore

  I pass what is perfect and shining

  to look for the whelks, whose edges

  have rubbed so long against the world

  they have snapped and crumbled—

  they have almost vanished,

  with the last relinquishing

  of their unrepeatable energy,

  back into everything else.

  When I find one

  I hold it in my hand,

  I look out over that shaking fire,

  I shut my eyes. Not often,

  but now and again there’s a moment

  when the heart cries aloud:

  yes, I am willing to be

  that wild darkness,

  that long, blue body of light.

  A Meeting

  She steps into the dark swamp

  where the long wait ends.

  The secret slippery package

  drops to the weeds.

  She leans her long neck and tongues it

  between breaths slack with exhaustion

  and after a while it rises and becomes a creature

  like her, but much smaller.

  So now there are two. And they walk together

  like a dream under the trees.

  In early June, at the edge of a field

  thick with pink and yellow flowers

  I meet them.

  I can only stare.

  She is the most beautiful woman

  I have ever seen.

  Her child leaps among the flowers,

  the blue of the sky falls over me

  like silk, the flowers burn, and I want

  to live my life all over again, to begin again,

  to be utterly

  wild.

  The Gift

  After the wind-bruised sea

  furrowed itself back

  into folds of blue, I found

  in the black wrack

  a shell called the Neptune—

  tawny and white,

  spherical,

 
with a tail

  and a tower

  and a dark door,

  and all of it

  no larger

  than my fist.

  It looked, you might say,

  very expensive.

  I thought of its travels

  in the Atlantic’s

  wind-pounded bowl

  and wondered

  that it was still intact.

  Ah yes, there was

  that door

  that held only the eventual, inevitable

  emptiness.

  There’s that—there’s always that.

  Still, what a house

  to leave behind!

  I held it

  like the wisest of books

  and imagined

  its travels toward my hand.

  And now, your hand.

  The Truro Bear

  There’s a bear in the Truro woods.

  People have seen it—three or four,

  or two, or one. I think

  of the thickness of the serious woods

  around the dark bowls of the Truro ponds;

  I think of the blueberry fields, the blackberry tangles,

  the cranberry bogs. And the sky

  with its new moon, its familiar star-trails,

  burns down like a brand-new heaven,

  while everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides

  shadows seem to grow shoulders. Surely

  a beast might be clever, be lucky, move quietly

  through the woods for years, learning to stay away

  from roads and houses. Common sense mutters:

  it can’t be true, it must be somebody’s

  runaway dog. But the seed

  has been planted, and when has happiness ever

  required much evidence to begin

  its leaf-green breathing?

  Alligator Poem

  I knelt down

  at the edge of the water,

  and if the white birds standing

  in the tops of the trees whistled any warning

  I didn’t understand,

  I drank up to the very moment it came

  crashing toward me,