Summer of the Bear by Steve Klepetar

My son texts me a photograph of his little daughters,
six and three, backs to the camera by a large picture window.
On the other side, a black bear cub.
You can’t see their faces,
but judging by their body language,
they aren’t at all afraid, pressing close to the glass.
And the cub too looks mild and unafraid,
curious it seems, at this interspecies meeting
by a house in the woods.
I post the photo on Facebook, “Granddaughters with bear.”
The comments fly in.
“OMG!”
“OMG!”
“OMG!”
One friend: “Isn’t it dangerous?”
Me: “Only if the glass breaks.”

That night, driving home from Tanglewood
(Hillary Hahn, an all Bach program) we pass a bear
ambling down Hawthorne Street.
The next day someone has posted a hand-scrawled sign
on the clubhouse, where we pick up our mail:
“Beware! Large male bear sighted
between the pond and the red barn.
Keep your dogs on a leash.”
Next to the sign, a photograph.
He is enormous, and just behind him to the left,
maybe fifty feet away you can see our house.

We read about black bears,
how they shy away from humans,
how there have been sixty-one recorded killings
by black bears since 1900,
how last year many more people were killed by bees,
domestic dogs, lightning strikes.
We sit on our porch, looking out toward the reeds,
the high grass and woods, hoping for a glimpse.
All night we roam the dream woods, where the great bears live
in the shadows of trees, leaking sometimes into the waking world.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. His work has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Klepetar is the author of fourteen poetry collections, the most recent of which are A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press) and Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps).