The Bull Moose

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps,
came the bull moose
to be stopped at last by a pole-fenced pasture.

Too tired to turn or, perhaps, aware
there was no place left to go, he stood with the cattle.
They, scenting the musk of death, seeing his great head
like the ritual mask of a blood god, moved to the other end
of the field, and waited.

The neighbors heard of it, and by afternoon
cars lined the road. The children teased him
with alder switches and he gazed at them
like an old, tolerant collie. The women asked
if he could have escaped from a Fair.

The oldest man in the parish remembered seeing 
a gelded moose yoked with an ox for plowing.
The young men snickered and tried to pour beer
down his throat, while their girl friends took their pictures.

And the bull moose let them stroke his tick-ravaged flanks,
let them pry open his jaws with bottles, let a giggling girl
plant a little purple cap
of thistles on his head.

When the wardens came, everyone agreed it was a shame
to shoot anything so shaggy and cuddlesome.
He looked like the kind of pet
women put to bed with their sons.

So they held their fire. But just as the sun dropped in the river
the bull moose gathered his strength
like a scaffold king, straightened and lifted his horns
so that even the wardens backed away as they raised their rifles.
When he roared, people ran to their cars. All the young men
leaned on their automobile horns as he toppled.

by Alden Nowlan, from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (very good, buy it)

The River

The way we fished for bullheads
was simple: hook, line, bobber,
cane pole and worm.

The murky, brown water of Root River
is where they hid
and waited our return.

The bobber was red & white.
At the first bite it danced then ran,
before going under—and I knew

that if it stayed under the fish
was on. Hooking them (they almost
always swallowed the bait)

was one thing, getting the hook
out without getting hooked oneself
on their lateral and frontal barbs

was quite another. That was
the solitary fishing
that few enjoyed as much as me.

I didn't understand then what
I needed in equal parts was
excitement, activity and adventure—

and more important than any
of these, solitude, in which my
being could be nourished

in silence. That silence
in which the imagination,
unbidden, comes to life.

Fishing alone brought
all of this together,
because it included living

beings, the mystery of life
from another realm that I could
pursue with my body my

imagination and my mind,
marveling at what I found,
not knowing what any of it could mean

or did mean, or would mean,
as I slowly moved
through the opening days of my life

"The River" by David Kherdian, from Nearer the Heart. © Taderon Press, 2006.(buy now)

(The "we" in this poem could have been Rush Gordon, my grandmother's handyman, grabbing the cane poles outside behind the laundry room, and walking me, as a little boy, down to Gran Gran's pond)