Galway Kinnell.

From Body Rags (1968)

1

In late winter

I sometimes glimpse bits of steam

coming up from

some fault in the old snow

and bend close and see it is lung-colored

and put down my nose

and know

the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2

I take a wolf’s rib and whittle

it sharp at both ends

and coil it up

and freeze it in blubber and place it out

on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished

I move out on the bear tracks,

roaming in circles

until I come to the first, tentative, dark

splash on the earth.

And I set out

running, following the splashes

of blood wandering over the world.

At the cut, gashed resting places

I stop and rest,

at the crawl-marks

where he lay out on his belly

to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice

I lie out

dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

3

On the third day I begin to starve,

at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would

at a turd sopped in blood,

and hesitate, and pick it up,

and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,

and rise

and go on running.

4

On the seventh day,

living by now on bear blood alone,

I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,

steamy hulk,

the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him

and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,

the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils

flared, catching

perhaps the first taint of me as he

died.

I hack

a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,

and tear him down his whole length

and open him and climb in

and close him up after me, against the wind,

and sleep.

5

And dream

of lumbering flatfooted

over the tundra,

stabbed twice from within,

splattering a trail behind me,

splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,

no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,

which dance of solitude I attempt,

which gravity-clutched leap,

which trudge, which groan.

6

Until one day I totter and fall --

fall on this

stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,

to digest the blood as it leaked in,

to break up

and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze

blows over me, blows off

the hideous belches of ill-digested bear-blood

and rotted stomach

and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across

my sore, lolled tongue a song

or screech, until I think I must rise

and dance. And I lie still.

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?

* * *

From Mortal Acts, Mortal Wounds (1980)

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn

or play loud music

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,

but let there be that heavy breathing

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house

and he will wrench himself awake

and make for it on the run -- as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears -- in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on --

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body --

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

this blessing love gives again into our arms.

***

From Body Rags (1968)

The Porcupine

1

Fatted

on herbs, swollen on crabapples,

puffed up on bast and phloem, ballooned

on willow flowers, poplar catkins, first

leafs of aspen and larch,

the porcupine

drags and bounces his last meal through ice,

mud, roses and goldenrod, into the stubbly high fields.

2

In character

he resembles us in seven ways:

he alchemizes by moonlight,

he shits on the run,

he uses his tail for climbing,

he chuckles softly to himself when scared,

he’s overcrowded if there’s more than one of him per five acres,

his eyes have their own inner redness.

3

Digger of

goings across floors, of hesitations

at thresholds, of

handprints of dread

at doorpost or window jamb, he would

gouge the world

empty of us, hack and crater

it

until it is nothing, if that

could rid it of all our sweat and pathos.

Adorer of ax

handles aflow with grain, of arms

of Morris chairs, of hand

crafted objects

steeped in the juice of fingertips,

of surfaces wetted down

with fist grease and elbow oil,

of clothespins that have

grabbed our body rags by underarm and crotch . . .

Unimpressed -- bored --

by the whirl of the stars, by these

he’s astonished, ultra-

Rilkean angel!

for whom the true

portion of the sweetness of earth

is one of those bottom-heavy, glittering, saccadic

bits

of salt water that splash down

the haunted ravines of a human face.

4

A farmer shot a porcupine three times

as it dozed on a tree limb. On

the way down it tore open its belly

on a broken

branch, hooked its gut,

and went on falling. On the ground

it sprang to its feet

and paying out gut heaved

and spartled through a hundred feet of goldenrod

before

the abrupt emptiness.

5

The Avesta

puts porcupine killers

into hell for nine generations, sentencing them

to gnaw out

each other’s hearts for the

salts of desire.

I roll

this way and that in the great bed, under

the quilt

that mimics this country of broken farms and woods,

the fatty sheath of the man

melting off,

the self-stabbing coil

of bristles reversing, blossoming outward --

a red-eyed, hard-toothed, arrow-stuck urchin

tossing up mattress feathers,

pricking the

woman beside me until she cries.

6

In my time I have

crouched, quills erected,

Saint

Sebastian of the

scared heart, and been

beat dead with a locust club

on the bare snout.

And fallen from high places

I have fled, have

jogged

over fields of goldenrod,

terrified, seeking home,

and among flowers

I have come to myself empty, the rope

strung out behind me

in the fall sun

suddenly glorified with all my blood.

7

And tonight I think I prowl broken

skulled or vacant as a

sucked egg in the wintry meadow, softly chuckling, blank

template of myself, dragging

a starved belly through the lichflowered acres,

where

burdock looses the arks of its seed

and thistle holds up its lost blooms

and rosebushes in the wind scape their dead limbs

for the forced-fire

of roses.

* * *

From Imperfect Thirst (1994)

My Mother’s R&R

She lay late in bed. Maybe she was sick,

though she was never sick. There were

pink flowers in full blossom in the wallpaper

and mote like bits of something ground up

churning in sun rays from the windows.

We climbed into bed with her.

Perhaps she needed comforting,

and she was alone, and she let us take

a breast each out of the loose slip.

"Let’s make believe we’re babies,"

Derry said. We put the large pink

flowers at the end of those lax breasts

into our mouths and sucked with enthusiasm.

She laughed and seemed to enjoy our play.

Perhaps intoxicated by our pleasure,

or frustrated by the failure of the milk

to flow, we sucked harder, probably

our bodies writhed, our eyes flared,

certainly she could feel our teeth.

Abruptly she took back her breasts

and sent us from the bed, two small

hungry boys enflamed and driven off

by the she-wolf. But we had got our nip,

and in the empire we would found,

we would taste all the women and expel

them all as they came to resemble her.