Ursa Minor

Hunger is the predator
That preys upon the black bear.
Up ahead a car is parked
In the middle of the road,
A zoom lens through the window.
A sleek, medium-sized bear
Forages in the margin,

Close enough to paw the lens
But not even looking up,
So unlike the countless deer
That bound in all directions
At each vehicle's approach.
Methodical as it seems,
This calm bear is in full flight.

Winter is ahead of it,
And winter is just behind.
Eat enough, it may survive
To eat again next summer.
Otherwise it will be gnawed
To slow death from the inside.
For now it ignores the lens,

Indigestible nuisance,
Worthless as the purring car,
Stones in the Way of the bear
Unless it smells food in there.
Mind is nose is tongue, are one.
Thus the bear's enlightenment:
Emptiness is never done.

Danse Libre

"We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows."

There are no portals to the infinite
the unmeasurable, the source, the one,
the unmanifest, pure being, the end,

I am sorry to report. There is none.
You and I can't go there, or can't come back,
the same. What we so avidly discuss

as if it were a state to be attained,
a good goal, only exists without us,
that which has no speck of us within it,

and what's odder, we've defined it that way.
Deep sleep, the divine, stillness and silence,
the timeless, are the names we say to unsay,

namers in awe of the unnameable,
are beams of photons we fire to outline
the vertiginous edge of emptiness

so we can feel the black hole's hunger defined
by our illustrations, as if the end
of all our traveling were to disappear

into our knowing what's around the bend.
We want what's not us to want us in it,
but there are no portals to what isn't.

Having Forgotten the Question

"They told us that 'the poets have the answers,'"
Sarah tells me when I return
from a considerable ramble

with Sequoia in the car seat at twilight,
past a parade of muledeer and whitetail,
assorted ravens, a cow elk, a black bear,

the nesting pair of bald eagles near
Fish Lake, and so forth, a good drive,
curvaceous, green, and glimmering.

Sarah hands me a flyer that the instructors
in mindful meditation had passed around
to the practicing meditators, a poem

by Mary Oliver, titled "Mindful,"
though I might have called it
both clever and joyful, as well,

and as I often am, when I am
anything at all, I'm contentedly
envious or enviously contented

to read her submerged opening
couplet rhyming "more or less
kills me with delight" with

"a needle in the haystack of light."
Outside the window, the moon,
frail crescent lacy as spun sugar,

decorates the rich creamy light
of summer sunset on the glacier,
the whole scene hanging over us

like a trompe l'oeil of the Face
of God, or worthier, and I wonder
how it would feel to be a needle

in that haystack of light--not
the light itself mind you, not
perhaps even shining at all,

this needle, just lost, buried,
aware of how unlikely to be found
thanks to the marvelous beauty,

the disheveled, tossed-together harvest
of sumptuous living and dying, turned-over,
tumbled heaps of light, light, light all around.

The Gardener

"It's not work. It just requires
Constancy," she says, perhaps
Being allusive, perhaps
Not. I prefer to think not,
To let our conversation
Remain as seeming artless
As this bear-country  garden

Beside the meltwater creek
Drawn from the ringing mountains.
Knotted, fecund cherry trees
Left behind by Doukhobors,
Dot a flowery greensward,
And a hand-hewn driftwood fence
Encloses rampant fruit rows.

Billowing sheer white curtains
And vine-heavy trellises
Circle the umber cottage
That gives the scene a center.
The effect is fairy book.
"Someone magical lives here,"
Suggests the illustration.

The suggestion is correct--
A proper gardener lives here,
Enhancing what the mountain
Ice and rain and snows allow,
Invisibly maintaining,
Season by season, what life
Demands to shade its underside.

Shoot

Out on a borrowed back porch
Quiet conversation turns
To bears: how many have you
Seen so far this year? Have they
Done your gardens much damage?
One ate all the strawberries.
One wrecked half a root cellar.

No funds for relocation:
One or two will end up shot.
That sends talk to past bears,
Post mortem, the goat killer,
The carjacker, that one bear
Who could turn unlocked doorknobs,
The one who shit on a bed.

All too smart for their own good.
All soon dead. "It's sort of hard
When you see your problem bear
Draped in a tree for a nap,
Looking cute, but then they're at
Your windows on clawed hind paws,
And you know that this won't do."

Rough-Hewn Runes

"With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life"

I killed an ant. More precisely,
I failed to fully kill an ant.
Stomping was easy, watching hard:
There's a divinity that can't

Stand to watch us chainsaw and whack
The boscage of our decisions:
Even silly little choices
Grow vulnerable to revisions.

The ant kept going, in circles,
Struggling, be she machine or clone,
To carry on with maintenance,
Which is life, which is life alone.

Stupid assemblage. I could not
Watch the struggle go on for long.
I had to put an end to it.
I stomped again to right the wrong.

It was as trivial a choice,
In human terms, as humans make,
To finish off a struggling bug.
Riddle me how it was my mistake.

Slocanada

Ready for it? Here comes Cape Horn
under a contrail crossing over
the shining scales of the long lake at sunset.

For your first Canada Day, Canuck,
we gave you a dawn walk by a labyrinth,
a dog show, a town stroll, a crazy service road

clambering rock-fields into high pines.
Life is a fast machine in this slow valley.
Good luck, kid, it's gonna be a long, short ride.