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The bear puts
both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down
as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to
kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the
sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall).
Her
great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As
she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire moth a lock of hair.
Such is the
uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to
make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to
you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a
cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage -
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces
back and forth and never rests
The me-nail click and
shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his
beat -
And at the other end the microscope,
Two
instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction
giving quite a spread.
Or if he rests from scientific
tread,
'Tis only to sit back and sway his head
Through ninety odd degrees of arc, it seems,
Between
two metaphysical extremes.
He sits back on his
fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any)
shut,
(lie almost looks religious but he's not),
And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,
At
one extreme agreeing with one Greek -
At the other
agreeing with another Greek
Which may be thought, but
only so to speak.
A baggy figure, equally pathetic
When sedentary and when peripatetic.
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