How to Survive a Bear Attack - April 5 2025

 

How to Survive a Bear Attack

April 5 2025

You can smell a bear

before you see it.

The 6th sense isn’t nearly as pungent as that.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's even real;

that we simply remember

when intuition gets it right

while discounting the misses.

But mostly, it’s paying attention.

Because the signs were there

I just never noticed.

So when I felt blindsided

gut-punched

utterly stunned,

it was simple obliviousness;

my insistence on seeing the world

as I wished it to be,

on imagining her

as a projection of me.

Perhaps magical thinking

is its own 6th sense;

not the clairvoyance or precognition

but the misses.

Like the magician’s beautiful assistant

in a levitation trick,

hovering long enough

before letting her down

to seem she belonged up there.

But while her descent was soft

I landed hard.

Like when the bear appeared

and I wasn’t sure

whether I was supposed to stay still

and make myself large,

or hunker down

in a protective ball

to save my head and heart.

I really like this poem.

Yet I wrote it in about 15 minutes, almost word for word as it is now, like taking dictation. Simply started with a book title that caught my eye, and riffed. Not very committed, either: a bunch of stuff I needed to do, and before it started to write itself, figured I’d soon write it off as a false start and get to work.

The good poems are like that: usually the short ones, and so effortless they seem too easy. Like cheating.

I guess my muse was in a good mood today, and chose to play along.