Despite the placard against the wall
with its warning, we do not believe in the bear.
We have stayed here so often, it seems like our own:
cabins and wooded trails, caves that I joke must house bears.
My sister stands up from the table, hisses,
“Come here!” I do not imagine you, Bear.
I have watched your sad kin pace bare earth in zoos,
but now: a god rising from grass, granite-black: Bear.
A childhood book, barely remembered – two sisters,
one golden, one dark. Briar Rose. Her lover a bear.
Grief is my litany, losses my rosary,
your world among them, a guilt that my kind must bear.
Back home in the city, far from this wilderness,
I will wake in the night and remember you, Bear.
*
Ice Storm
A branch snaps with a whip-crack
high over your right shoulder. You bolt upright
in bed, knowing what that sound portends --
no time to leap aside if it’s aimed at you.
Underground, that’s where you should have slept,
huddled in some den like a rabbit or bear.
You should have cut the damn trees down.
Then the heavy swish and slip, the shudder
as half the tree and its ice-cloak slam the ground.
Your heart’s stutter in the moment before
you know this death has spared you, though
the night has many more hours, many more trees
to fall, and you will lie awake, anticipate them all.
*
Fog Fills the Winter Valley
Fog fills the winter valley,
wine in a silver cup.
Its silence echoes
what the stars won’t tell;
its scent is clean and brisk
as snow. I part my lips
and taste it on my tongue.
I could die of thirst
before I drink enough
of the fog and of this world
with its soft and its rough,
its jagged mornings
and tender nights,
the moon leaning down
to witness our brief lives,
as we flicker like fireflies
through the haze
that envelops us.
The fog slips down my throat
like smoke. Never
enough.
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Rebecca Baggett is the author of the prize-winning collection, The Woman Who Lives Without Money (Regal House Publishing, 2022) and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Asheville Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Salt, The Southern Review, and The Sun. She lives with her husband, Elmer Clark, in Athens, Georgia, where she stewards Little Free Library #110,420 and plants native gardens.