Free The Truro Bear and Other Adventures by Mary Oliver Page A

solidly silent
    and rises
        on the mass of his legs,
            disdainful and free
    as anything on earth
    could ever be—
        this is the bear
            I want to see.

At Herring Cove
    The edge of the sea shines and glimmers. The tide rises and falls, on ordinary not on stormy days, about nine feet. The beach here is composed of sand and glacial drift; the many-colored pebbles of this drift have been well rounded by the water’s unceasing, manipulative, glassy touch. In addition, all sorts of objects are carried here by the currents, by the galloping waves, and left as the sea on the outgoing tide tumbles back.
    From one tide to the next, and from one year to the next, what do I find here?
    Grapefruit, and orange peel, and onion sacks from the fishing boats; balloons of all colors, with ribbons dangling; beer cans, soft drink cans, plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic bottle caps, feminine hygiene by-products, a few summers ago several hypodermic needles, the odd glove and the odd shoe, plastic glasses, old cigarette lighters, mustard bottles, plastic containers still holding the decomposing bodies of baitfish; fishhooks rusty or still shining, coils of fishline; balls of fishline, one with a razor-billed auk in a death-grip.
    Sea clams, razor clams, mussels holding on with their long beards to stones or each other; a very occasional old oyster and quahog shell; other shells in varying degrees of whiteness: drills, whelks, jingles, slippers, periwinkles, moon snails. Bones of fish, bodies of fish and of skates, pipefish, goosefish, jellyfish, dogfish, starfish, sand dabs; blues or parts of blues or the pink, satiny guts of blues; sand eels in the blackened seaweed, silver, and spackled with salt.
    Dead harbor seal, dead gull, dead merganser, dead gannet with tiny ivory-colored lice crawling over its snowy head and around its aster-blue eyes. Dead dovekie in winter.
    Once, on a summer morning at exact low tide, the skull of a dolphin at the edge of the water. Later the flanged backbone, tail bones, hip bones slide onto the sand and return no more to the gardens of the sea.
    One set of car keys. One quarter, green and salt-pocked.
    Egg case of the left-handed whelk, black egg cases of skates; sea lace, the sandy nests of the moon snail, not one without its break in the circle; once, after a windy night, a drenched sea mouse.
    More gorgeous than anything the mind of man has yet or ever will imagine, a moth,
Hyalophora cecropia,
in the first morning of its long death. I think of Thoreau’s description of one he found in the Concord woods: “it looked like a young emperor just donning the most splendid robes that ever emperor wore ….” The wings are six inches across, and no part of them is without an extraordinary elaboration of design—swirls, circles, and lines, brief and shaped like lightning. Upon its taut understructure, the wings are powdery and hairy, like the finest fur closely shorn. White and cream and black, and a silver-blue, wine red and rust red, a light brown here and a darker brown there and still a deeper brown elsewhere, not to speak of the snowy white of the body’s cylinder, and the stripes of the body, and the red fringe of the body, and the rust-colored legs, and the black plumes of the antennae. Once it was the hungry green worm. Then it flew, through the bottleneck of the deepest sleep, through the nets of the wind, into the warm field. And now it is the bright trash of the past, its emptiness perfect, and terrible.

Coyote in the Dark, Coyotes Remembered
    The darkest thing
met me in the dark.
It was only a face
and a brace of teeth
that held no words,
though I felt a salty breath
sighing in my direction.
Once, in an autumn that is long gone,
I was down on my knees
in the cranberry bog
and heard, in that lonely place,
two voices coming down the hill,
and I was thrilled
to be granted this secret,
that the coyotes, walking