Galway Kinnell
1927-:
BLACKBERRY EATING
[from Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past (1993), Houghton
Mifflin Company]
1 I love to go out in late September
2 among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
3 to eat blackberries for breakfast,
4 the stalks very prickly, a penalty
5 they earn for knowing the black art
6 of blackberry making; and as I stand among them
7 lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
8 fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
9 as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
10 like strengths or squinched or broughamed,
11 many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
12 which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
13 in the silent, startled, icy, black language
14 of blackberry eating in late September.
Galway Kinnell
1927-:
THE BEAR
[from Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past (1993), Houghton
Mifflin Company]
1
1 In late winter
2 I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
3 coming up from
4 some fault in the old snow
5 and bend close and see it is lung-colored
6 and put down my nose
7 and know
8 the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
1 I take a wolf's rib and whittle
2 it sharp at both ends
3 and coil it up
4 and freeze it in blubber and place it out
5 on the fairway of the bears.
6 And when it has vanished
7 I move out on the bear tracks,
8 roaming in circles
9 until I come to the first, tentative, dark
10 splash on the earth.
11 And I set out
12 running, following the splashes
13 of blood wandering over the world.
14 At the cut, gashed resting places
15 I stop and rest,
16 at the crawl-marks
17 where he lay out on his belly
[Page 64 ]
18 to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
19 I lie out
20 dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3
1 On the third day I begin to starve,
2 at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
3 at a turd sopped in blood,
4 and hesitate, and pick it up,
5 and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
6 and rise
7 and go on running.
4
1 On the seventh day,
2 living by now on bear blood alone,
3 I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
4 steamy hulk,
5 the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
6 I come up to him
7 and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
8 the dismayed
9 face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
10 flared, catching
11 perhaps the first taint of me as he
12 died.
13 I hack
14 a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
15 and tear him down his whole length
16 and open him and climb in
17 and close him up after me, against the wind,
18 and sleep.
5
1 And dream
2 of lumbering flatfooted
[Page 65 ]
3 over the tundra,
4 stabbed twice from within,
5 splattering a trail behind me,
6 splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
7 no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
8 which dance of solitude I attempt,
9 which gravity-clutched leap,
10 which trudge, which groan.
6
1 Until one day I totter and fall--2 fall on this
3 stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
4 to digest the blood as it leaked in,
5 to break up
6 and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
7 blows over me, blows off
8 the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
9 and rotted stomach
10 and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
11 blows across
12 my sore, lolled tongue a song
13 or screech, until I think I must rise up
14 and dance. And I lie still.
7
1 I awaken I think. Marshlights
2 reappear, geese
3 come trailing again up the flyway.
4 In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
5 lies, licking
6 lumps of smeared fur
7 and drizzly eyes into shapes
8 with her tongue. And one
9 hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
10 the next groaned out,
11 the next,
[Page 66 ]
12 the next,
13 the rest of my days I spend
14 wandering: wondering
15 what, anyway,
16 was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which
17 I lived?