Necessity

With thanks to Eavan Boland


Bruno is the bear the Midwest chose to save us
from the virus that spring when we pandemic’d
in our basements, eyes on screens, craving the next
solitary hiker’s Facebook post—the contact tracing
of ursine peregrinations.
He waddled down from Wisconsin,
leaving in Illinois fields the first footprints of his kind
for a hundred years. He swam the Mississippi. Tried
his luck in Iowa, then, at Davenport, another float
to Illinois,
where, in the boundary of those muddy waters
our marrows whispered what our mouths would never say.
Sometimes a scapegoat savior is one who lets us realize now
may be the worst season of the worst year of a whole people.
No wonder hearts thumped
in our collective chest,
as we watched videos of state police stop traffic
(more than once) to assure his roly-poly crossings,
a strange relief from sickness and all the other images
of cops we saw that summer.
When the Times
and Daily Mail quoted unnamed experts saying
Bruno wandered for a mate, a million humans sighed.
At Hannibal, he bypassed caves and local legend.
With the Gateway to the West in sight, rangers tranquilized
and tagged him,
released him to the Ozarks, which
I didn’t know, when, against our better judgements,
my wife and I retreated to a cabin by an Appalachian river
older than the mountains. At dusk,
a shadow of a bear
became a bear, fording eighty yards below the rapids.
We texted its picture to the landlord, who told us
this was nature unfolding for us all—a quaint
and wrong idea,
which we let her keep, as we have kept
our wants pinned to a voyager bear, who took them riding
on his woolly back with less regard than ticks. Once
a squirrel could fly from Massachusetts to the shores
of the Pacific, tree-to-tree and never touch the ground—
everywhere below, a bear.
Now, an entire nation begs
to be reclaimed. Perhaps by Bruno, soon—before the fall—
as he travels plagued by fear of living lonely,
a state, which we, convenient in our isolation,
mis-reckon as a noble search for love.