Gabriel Gudding, "Memoirs of the Backhoe"
Hale Chatfield, "Seeing a Bear"
Gabriel Gudding
MEMOIRS OF THE BACKHOE
“It’s iron. And iron don’t give a shit.”
-Captain Bill Petersen, April 4, 1992, somewhere in the Gulf of Alaska
Once in Yellowstone
I watched a beaver launched cooked
from that one fastidious geyser.
The thud was holy.
I recall the cold hanks of nylon hawsers strewing the foredecks on the glabrous waters
of Frederick Sound.
I recall the shots from the fantail. Our wake sewn with albatross.
I recall the tired belligerence of Tyrone Tremblay who died crushed on a gravel berm
after a 30 foot flight on his Husqvarna 400.
His belt-buckle ignited the gastank.
His jacket burned for 40 minutes.
Once, on a dark day, the sun bobbed in oily clouds
like a cheap green apple, & all it did all day
was shine & roll, shine & roll.
It was in that old man’s demesne, in a rake-littered yard, beached on cinder blocks
that I feared to come to rest – and have. My treads are bobbysox.
I ate cake with the Prince of Dahomey & ran strewing my clothes through his
cornfields
chasing his daughter.
I drank the coldest Kirschwasser with my friend Christian Krogstad
before he became a snob.
I recall the brooding doodles dark as fudge drawn by Joseph Stalin at Yalta —
or something like them in the purple midden
of the Woodland abattoir.
And only today my treads were clanking like colossal tumblers of Chardonnay
toasting all that had been buried under corn & sunlight
before the foreman jiggled my gears like the wind in a rosebush
and tapped away my glimmer and crash.
I tell you, it seems like months that my bucket was wind-shook above the grass.
If you ever do
see a bear here
in the camp
what time will it be?
where will you see it?
How will it manifest
itself?
One morning
I did see a bear
near the road in, only a hundred
or so yards from here, but
not in the camp, really.
It was
Not what I expected—because
I was not expecting anything
when I saw it suddenly:
it was just there, busy
among the blueberry bushes.
Surely the bear wasn’t expecting
anything, certainly not me,
certainly not this poem about
five or six years later.
What are you ready to see?
Whatever it is, will it be
what you imagined, as you
imagined you’d see it?
For fun I imagine
I come upon this guy
writing a poem in the woods
and I discover, first,
that the poem is this very poem
and, secondly, that it isn’t at all
what I had expected.