Open, smell, settle, begin…
–from Hermit Songs, Seamus
Heaney
Through the end of new rain, black
push out from the soil—from the rush
of
alder streams bass line of vapor
a
bear
shining
onyx in the dilute
cold
of late spring
leads
with her nose and
lumbers more easily than
the
sun
slow across the street as light
is lost in her coat and the numbing
memory
of winter’s cool clarity.
It’s in the way her legs slide
down from the slopes of her shoulders
into the muffled growth of summer—
mouths as yet mute, but liquid soon
to sing
with the wind of heat and rush of
milk—to bloom again the stomachs
of the ripe and young; downy ombré
of black bear into umber
to
the other side.
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