Grizzly Man

He wanted to belong
for he so loved the bears
he touched new scat, envied it
had been inside as
he soon was, all but wrist and skull, a bit of spine.
His watch, alive, beheld
the scene, grimly stay alive,
insensate batteries pushing it
further into time than he, the bears
just an instrument of his loneliness,
he the victim of his own beliefs
that if you walk just right and talk just right
you can avoid the kill by power and control.
He thought the bears had saved his life and
perhaps for a while they did, he spying on their
wrestling match, commenting on their poops.

The wish to die comes in all flavors,
scotch or rye and most for the
failure of a word to reach the antidote
for the chemical mayhem of the brain,
or the mystery of what to each
is surcease for the burning sense,
alone.

Harp

When my last lover
sat by me
at the reading of an ex-mentor,
friendly (why he doin' that?),
I kept talking as if there
were something to say.
Gracious, he dips his bread into my blood,
I into his.
I did not crash and burn,
ran to Shades of Green,
where my neighbor waits,
for a glass of Harp.
Just one.
And she told me a story
about her little son,
the one who is so "distracted by language"
he can't stop trying out new words
like saying "Out, out"
and trying to pick an apple out of a picture
with his thumb and forefinger.
"Bad," he says, "and nice."

-- Susan H. Maurer