Bear River By Stephanie V Sears

      ​Fuzzy Mannerz Flickr



​​Bear River

A line is drawn there against the business of man.
The frowning spruce watch over mercurial greens
where the bay breeds a full-bodied river to a libertarian sea.
In the inkpots of the creek behind, autumn spends freely,
tossing gold coins afloat with blithe buoyancy.
Carmine maples gather close to the water
rooted in spiraling eddies,  portals
to endless spinning yarns
where man has so small a part
and hybrid bodies of rock and tide
born to sensation hide far below the irrelevant sun
that keeps the deerskin hunter square-shouldered
among his provident trees though he cannot perceive
the parallel monologues that speak his absence
over the wave-rutted beach haunted by
fossilized breath and propulsion, tumbled jasper,
calcium turbines and abandoned stairwells. 
Silence always a gulping of space,
a transparency in which hoariness reunites with youth
and secrets blown apart diffuse
their ciphers back into the pervasive hush.


Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist ( Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indifinite Space..