But you still need to activate your account.
Black as the blackest hours before dawn,
the black bear clambered up the deck stairs,
and pulled down the feeder for the season.
Shocked by the light, he hugged the railing
like a fumbling tightrope walker and thudded
down to lumber off into the darkness
that light makes of everything not itself.
Neither cub nor grown-up; a spring wanderer.
And so, when the white-throated sparrows
who sing so fulsomely about Old Sam
Peabody, and the squeaky, chattering finches,
and of course the chickadees and their friends
the nuthatches, finish pecking up
this morning’s mess, that will be that. They’ll
have to find their own bugs and buds
and seeds. And it’s the time they should
light out. When my eyes met the bear’s
black glitter, no luminous communion
exchanged. It’s common here. Everyone
knows better than to keep feeders up
on into May, yet everyone forgets
sometimes. Our deer don’t step gingerly
from the woods to curl up next to us
while we write pleased poems in our yards.
We bait bears here. Which is not to say
I do, but don’t you say “we” when you talk
about America? How cruel & empty
we are. Unlike Tuscany, let’s say, where not so
long ago I know they caught and ate
their sparrows, sometimes thirty to a stew.
William Hathaway’s hard-edged poems have appeared frequently in national periodicals and in seven books, the most recent of which is “Sightseer,” published by Canio’s Editions of Sagaponack, N.Y. He lives in Surry.
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