Forwarded to me by my colleague Ray Gordezky, with whom I am part of a team looking convening people around polar bears in Northern Labrador and Quebec.
The Moon Speaks of Polar Bears
Hailey Leithauser
Some things are better defined
by what they are not,
as when snow heaping the world
replaces the world, becoming
no longer a rooftop, no longer a narrow
gravel shoreline or road,
even in times, in places,
no longer the black breathing
of the sea.
In this way the polar bear
stealing her difficult, beautiful life
from the ridges
and drifts, the colorless
plateau around her,
teaches her young to hunt
by sliding her belly
flat along the frozen light,
blunting her cloudlike
respiration, covering
with one comic paw
the dark flesh of her nose,
so well suited to her artifice
that the oily
seals collecting the ice
are pulled by an intimate
landscape, soundless
and ravenous and white.
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