for Elise
Bears have this habit. Have you heard? Whether Tuesday or Thursday—and it’s always Tuesday or Thursday—they take to the pavement and summon the rain snow sun wind with a rainbow of sidewalk chalk, drawing the circles in which to dance, but instead of dancing, lumbering, because this is what bears do: they lumber, unresting, and the humans find it scary (to lumber, verb, recalls lumber, noun; no home is too far from uncharted bearitory). What is that fear? What is its name? To see a bear so thick with alien desire, a longing for sunwindrainsnow unparsable by square-toothed mouths? Perhaps a human with a pair of whittled canines might understand, though my own heart closed, bladder gave, teeth fell straight from my mouth, sharp cones each, when I saw one. My first bear. No weather dance this time, just slow slow lumbering, right up to a fallen slice of sausage pizza. There was a big pause, as big as a bear, as the delivery guy looked the slice up and down, imagining the hair-thin line separating his own body from the pigs on the pizza. Luck, I tell myself often. Luck makes that divide, and luck is as skinny as a hair, fast as a hare, fast as gardenbuns I chase for fun and show and because, so I am told, the chase is pleasure and pleasure gets me free.
Bears have dancing down to a science: begin to the left of Tuesday and round the drive so that the cars can’t park and even the kids on bikes can’t pass. Start off with blue chalk, because blue is the color of everything that matters, and then they go to green. Trace one-legged like compasses, make circles out of angles. Poor hairy ankles derive the chalk from below and turn their legs a fuzzy blue, such that when they lumber dust shivers into every green stalk, dying it blue or brown or red or simply a violenter kind of green. And then the weather comes. They do not feign surprise. The thunder rain sleet breeze runs the same path as their chalked feet leave. The driveway chalk sobs toward the street. Cars pass over it, up their lights to cut the fog mist cloud haze. The cold is a blade. Hot heat shivers before our eyes. I have seen a bear cleave weather with a tonguestrike, just as easy as a chalkmark.
