NYU Black Renaissance Noire Volume 18 Issue 1 - Winter 2018 | Page 14

Old Man Hears the Brain’s Howling Beast Prose Poem: A Bear in the Cedar
Old man listens to the bells and his lifelong failures
echoing through the brittle points in his bones.
The years sit on his head as if chewing him away.
The world of the illogical is a ghost in
the hideaway of his imagination.
His heart drums with ease at finding
the imagination is the compass,
the guide through the thousand and one fields
he passed through in a lifetime. After dinner while sitting in my rocking chair gazing out the patio window at a red cedar,
I caught something forming from a branch. Within five to ten seconds a creature settled
on the branch the wind slowly blew from side to side. My eyes sang to the visitor: “Bear,
you’re welcome.” The image soon changed to a bear mask and stared straight at me for a
few seconds more, then faded. The mask was cedar with distinct carved planes with
edges like the old ones of our ancestors. His muzzle pointed toward me and his open
mouth shined like a passing moon. Dusk shifted to a grizzly bear face. He had a rough
texture and approaching night revealed brownish-black hair. I saw the bear as a friend.
Fear was as far away as the Salish Sea on our green rambling coast. I spun around in my
head like a gyroscope; joy mirrored the moment for the two of us: brothers in a land of
disappearances. I pulled my chair closer to the patio; the cedar branch swept back into
focus as if no one had been there. The swinging branch shot my breath higher than the
North Star. The cedar spoke as a carrier of a guardian who would take me beyond
myself. The blue flow beyond signaled a mask that came from a time the forest rippled
in our blood like a river of evergreens, stones, and salmon. The bear took me to an open
field. His eyes possessed mine for the duration of his presence. The bear talked to me in
his own way, at a silent space I may never comprehend but should value like our breath
of life. The tree and Bear gave me a story to pass on to you.
Time’s perfume sticks to his skin
like the living and dead and newborn.
No matter how fiercely he desires to dig
his toes in the green earth and return to age
seven like the red-tailed hawk with sun wingtips,
he is stuck. The wind brushes against his face
winter’s grinding stones, yet he breathes
on and blinks his eyes like he was
leftover computer keys.
He senses he cannot run from the lies
littering his stories with success and glory.
When the cookie-cutter moon waves goodbye,
the old man wonders if he will find his way home
in the thud of a heartbeat.