Gypsies believe bear and man are brothers. The evidence? They have the same body beneath their hides, each likes to drink beer, enjoy music and under its sway, dance.
Gypsy Folklore
Mr. Virtue and The Three Bears
by R. P. Blackmur
We hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. Flaubert
This morning at his gas stand in Lucerne on Route 1, Mr. Virtue was found devoured by his bear. Mr. Virtue left no known relatives. (Remembered some fifteen years later from the Bangor Daily News.)
I knew a bear once ate a man named Virtue
All but a mire of clothes, an unlicked bear
Caught, a May cub, to dance for soda pop;
Who when half-grown lumbered before us slowly,
Gurgling and belching in the gas-stand yard,
On a sorry chain, and made rough music there.
A chattel property of Mr. Virtue,
Untaxable and nameless, this black bear,
For some a joke to sell flat soda pop,
For some terror in chains, wove himself slowly
Through foundered postures, till hunger smalled his yard,
And he broke free by eating Virtue there.
If no kin came to claim the clothes of Virtue,
Yet hundreds claimed themselves in that black bear
And drank the upset crate of soda pop,
Kin drinking kin: drinking the stink that slowly,
Like a bear’s pavanne, swept the gravel yard
And made of vertigo a music there.
So fell the single hymn to Mr. Virtue:
In rough music that burst from that young bear
When sudden soda in his loins went pop,
All longing and no hope, and he danced slowly,
Rearing and dropping in his chain-swept yard,
Till Mr. Virtue dumped spoiled blueberries there.
–And yet, there move two musics wooing Virtue:
Those of the Great and of the Lesser Bear,
Of the star falling and of new soda pop;
And these two bears dance best when long time slowly,
Overheard, the Dipper spills by inch and yard
The northern lights on us from darkness there.
So praises blew in this bear feast on Virtue.
The greater sprang within the lesser bear
In music wild in the spilled light, to pop,
And by created hunger move, most slowly,
The blacker stars, fast set in their hard yard,
To loose their everlasting shivers there.
Let us in virtue so beseech the bear,
With soda pop, that he may dance slowly
Move in our yard constellations darkly there.
It is not often I swerve in this blog from short to longer form poems. But today is an exception. Maybe its because I am feeling like a bear in need of eating virtue, or maybe I am a man, out to gut my brothers? Or maybe I a man in need of a drink, or maybe I am a bear in need of blood? Or maybe because its April fool’s day? Whatever the cause, I was inspired by the balance in these two poems, justice denied, justice deserved. Are we the constellations in the heavens, in our slow rotating dance, or are we hungry bears here on earth? Either way brothers (and sisters), let’s find a better way forward than eating each other….
Fourteen Lines 