Every time I glance up at the framed
lithograph hanging on my den wall
of a bear sitting at its ease browsing
through the pages of A Bears Guide
I imagine a band of brother bears
traveling to a camp on the Yellowstone
for a summertime confabulation
on the century's greatest writers!
Of course Steinbeck rates four stars
followed by Faulkner and Jack London
(Yoknapatawpha and frigid Alaska)
home territory to shaggy mammals
and their fictional canine companions
wandering the vast wildernesses
of the bears' imagination.
When it came to the merits of such
as Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald,
bear fans of each disagreed, growled
and tore up the trees, rolling boulders
down the hills into the Yellowstone;
but the subject of James Joyce
and his stream of consciousness
had bears leaving piles of scat
in quiet mountain meadows
defiling the landscape with
ursine opinion of a literary
Irishman and his books!
Michael Pruchnicki
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-bears-guide/
