The Estuary

The brown bear living near the estuary,

and wading out when the tide swells and the salmon run,

during the days of the dwindling salmon runs,

and slapping with his big right paw a hook-nosed fish

whipsawing inland to spawn,

the ambidextrous bear,

furred like the forest from which he emerged,

waddling into the unteachable waters

to swat the salmon out the fast-running tide

and catch the red salmon in his mouth

and toss and juggle the sockeye salmon

thrashing and drowning in the air—

and when he’s expressed himself completely

he catches with his jaw the self

that swam ten thousand miles to the estuary

and daintily, mincingly, with one paw grasping

the caudal fin and the other the head,

eats that salmon as if he were we

and the fish an ear of boiled corn—

that bear is a bear about whom rich and complicated

feelings can be felt. That is a bear from whom ideas

about the state of nature can be derived.

Cruelty is the wrong word to describe

the pleasure he gets from playing with his lunch.

Play and life are the same thing to him,

art and life, life and death.

Creation impinging on a consciousness

clear and crystalline. Pinpoint revelatory

explosions unsoiled by words, unbesmirched.

Creation clambering out of the waters,

shaking itself off, creation

surrounding itself with itself . . .

Stay down on the pavement where you just fell in a heap

like a bag of laundry, just stay there. Move even a

little and you might damage something else.

You’ve already done plenty of damage.

Stay down, supine. Stay down,

and let the giant buildings loom over you, let them

in their abstract imperium stun you with their indifference.

Wasn’t that the reason you built them in the first place?

Stay down, stay down, and ask yourself:

“Could I be the bear in this fable?”

“Could I be the fish?”

“Could I be whoever is imagining all this?”