SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Reg Saner,
Award-winning poet, essayist, & professor emeritus
Boulder, Colorado
Fullbright Scholar in Florence, Italy
NEA Fellowship,
Guggenheim Fellowship
Walt Whitman Award (1976)
National Poetry Series (1981)
Colorado Governor’s Award (1983), Hazel Barnes Prize (1993)
Wallace Stegner Award (1997), Boulder Poet Laureate (1999)
2 Poems by Reg Saner
Forest Mornings I Can't Ask to Happen
Say I'm bending toward yet another clue
to this world it’s taking me forever to know
as my lifetime goes by. Tiny and sprightly
a pine siskin lights up its spruce tip,
all a-twitter at our wild setting. Naked trunks
hugely ruined lie strewn about me like heroes
fallen athwart broken omens of stone,
and laid so low the squirrels convert them
to raceways. Jasper Creek keeps crashing
into its plunge pool, seethes there a while
till calmed to the clarity of an absolute substance:
dark, heavy, and cold. Then, no less mysterious
than we are, again goes lunging pell-mell as water
we don't give a thought to. Oh yes, on forest mornings
I can't ask to happen, any harebell may arrest me
by dangling stream-side into slight mist
from the creek’s cascade, the better to shelter
oracular pollen. A Steller's jay falling freely
down the mountain may flare suddenly up
and open so electric-blue onto dwarf willow
it fires my ambition always to be just as I am
here and now – though chances are
I'll be heading elsewhere with my next breath,
just as forest wind hurrying on, hurrying on,
wouldn't be wind if it didn’t.
This Grizzly
Is a plantigrade-gaited and growly
inquisitor, a huge-humped and hulking
sulker, all bilge-bellied and bossy;
is a boreal and forest-fearsome crush
of claws; is claws alive with bloom
pawed up from tundras of mud;
is hunger-hearted and ugly, a horrible
beauty whose hairy breath is berry-laced
and ruddy as blood; is a hunter
hunted; is harried and hated.
Is a greens-grazing corm-cruncher,
a salad-snatcher, a riffle-raiding
salmon smacker, a basher and elk eater,
a mouse mauler, a moose muncher,
a maw.
And is furthermore female,
for males a mighty mountable smell
and color, and coupled is fecund:
a cub-collared sponge, a food-filter,
a milk-mill—comfy for sucklings
but for all others Big Mama,
one fanged and angry fur-cloud brown.
This grizzly is poached, is paw-prized
and applauded, is study-surrounded,
is rounded up and counted; is sleep-shot
and rifled, radio-rigged and revived;
is written up and written off
as a brave and brazen nose too fell
for what our West has become;
thus hounded, thus Nationally Parked
and impounded, this grizzly
gets pondered.
SageGreenJournal.org is a non-commercial project, an online anthology, to share a poetic vision of the land we love.
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