314 PART THREE
If the blood-sopped turd thrust in and gnashed down wasn’t already enough,
here some readers lose it in hideous belches. Yet this dream creature, lying in a
charged stillness, wants to rise, dance, sing.
Finally, half dream half waking, the poem opens to a new reality. “I awaken
I think” and spring has come, as we know from “reappear” and “trailing
again.”
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?Is he still dreaming? Marshlights, from methane gas, we call will-o’-the-wisp
that flickers deceptively over damp terrain. But a mother bear is licking her
newborn cubs.
Then midway through a line where her tongue shapes new life, the ordeal
resumes, trudging toward a question. What ’s this last-ditch saving flavor? The
bear-poet ’s song? Perhaps, says Kinnell, but “whatever allows us to flourish,
thatis the poetry” in our lives.
Hunt, ordeal, quest, legend, ritual, dream, with overtones of Creation and the
Eucharist, plus Faulkner’s novella The Bear, whose hero hunts then refrains from
killing his prey: Kinnell’s “The Bear” is all that and something more. Gauging
the task of a poet ’s imagination and its cost, he enters a primitive place of men
and animals. Like it or not, says Kinnell, we ’re “creatures of nature,” too often
thwarting “our deepest desire, which is to be one with all creation.”
Lots more has come from his pen. An oratorio to lower Manhattan, “The
Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” teems with urban
sounds, sights, people, creeds, and trades in verse that smacks of Pablo Neruda,
his favorite foreign poet.