The Truro Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver

Ghosts
        1.
    Have you noticed?
        2.
    Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it’s hard to tell now
what’s bone, and what merely
was once.
    The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass.
        3.
    1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairie watching
a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,
helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.
        4.
    In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.
    In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.

Nothing will coax them out again

but the people dancing.
        5.
    Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.
    Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.
    Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood—hellhunks
in the prairie heat.
        6.
    Have you noticed?
how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins.
Have you noticed?

how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed?
gone now.
        7.
    Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.

Carrying the Snake to the Garden
    In the cellar
was the smallest snake
I have ever seen.
It coiled itself
in a corner
and watched me
with eyes
like two little stars
set into coal,
and a tail
that quivered.
One step
of my foot
and it fled
like a running shoelace,
but a scoop of the wrist
and I had it
in my hand.
I was sorry
for the fear,
so I hurried
upstairs and out the kitchen door
to the warm grass
and the sunlight
and the garden.
It turned and turned
in my hand
but when I put it down
it didn’t move.
I thought
it was going to flow
up my leg
and into my pocket.
I thought, for a moment,
as it lifted its face,
it was going to sing.
    And then it was gone.

The Opossum
    Beauty of fox, lemur, panther,
aardvark, thunder-worm, condor,
    the quagga, the puffer, the kudu,
and this: the opossum
    with her babies hanging on, gray lumps
all around the scaly tail
    that was bent over her back, like a sailboat’s boom,
for the very small and oh! almost human baby-fingers
    to cling to. At first I thought
it was some pitiful broken thing
    lumping along over the scrubby leaves,
and then I saw the brown dog-softness of her long-lashed eyes
    as, swiftly, with that wobbling burden of life upon her,
she ran.

This Is the One
    The bear
    who shuffles
        over the hillsides
            filling himself
    with berries
    until his tongue is purple
        (which, remember, is
            a royal color)—
    the bear
    who circles the cabin,
        who will not steal the honey,
            who will not rifle the knapsack
    of the sleeping camper—
    the one
        who sits by himself
            by the river,
    who sings to himself
    the secret song
        no one has ever heard—
            the bear
    who yawns
    with the cavernous mouth
        of a shaggy god—
            who, when he sees me
    is