Is it better that a bear be long-lived
in a trained bear show
or to lope along his six-years with coneflowers
getting more and more distant
from the blueberry bushes?
I woke up certain that my small daughter
and I had dreamed the same chicken faces
with goat horns that tried to initiate our friend
in his meditations; the start of fall is felt
in the air above the wood chips
as a sudden slight dip in the bathtub temperature.
With some mountains, mountain-ness comes first,
and that’s scary when first driving into them.
Is it better to leave the beach
on a gray day or a beautiful day
and then drive back across black woods?
Those were good girls that showed
smaller kids how to straddle slick lake rocks.
This mountain creek is not really a river yet.
In the lake shine, there were some chunky girls
wading in clear water with bellybuttons
deep as the largest olives at the market,
and jug-heads in the water, whoever they
were, were weirdly hostile in their gang
that seemed to need a trainer, a small car,
hay and meat, a barrel to jump in with a bunghole
and a lick of ice cream. The waitress,
had she the somewhat dirty-looking hair
of a roadside bear? How many colors
of rock are there on these roadside seams
where the bears eat under
the power-line up the cut?