This week’s poem takes us outside and into blueberry season. Sandy Stott’s “Following the Bear” is both a beautiful paean to the title creature and a subtle meditation on the act of gleaning – that is, gathering the remainders of a crop after someone else has harvested it. As he picks berries in the wake of another mammal’s picking, the poem’s speaker reflects on filmmaker Agnès Varda’s documentary “The Gleaners and I” and its many forms of gleaning. Stott leaves us with the refreshing humility of a human content to let the first and best harvest go to another animal than himself.
Stott writes nonfiction for a variety of publications, focusing especially on New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and he writes a column on search and rescue for Appalachia Journal. His book “Critical Hours – Search and Rescue in the White Mountains” is in its third printing. He lives in Brunswick.
Following the Bear
By Sandy Stott
Sometimes I like to be second,
the gleaner in a patch
after the bear’s combed his clusters
through the white strainer
of his teeth. Then
it’s one tiny blue globe
at a time berry by berry
my pail fills slowly
or hardly at all.
In Varda’s Les Glaneurs
it’s rare to see a full set
of teeth; often,
the mouths that offer
explanation are dark caves
and the words rush out
like evening’s bats.
On this hilltop far
from the flat French fields
and their humps of cast-offs,
far from the turnings
of the plow’s old angled hand,
this evening it’s just me
and the bear-in-waiting,
that one over in the fringe
of poplars whose round pale leaves
speckle his dark body,
that one who’s eaten the whole blue day,
that one who appears to be following me.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Following the Bear” copyright © 2018 by Sandy Stott, reprinted from Senior Hiker Magazine. It appears by permission of the author.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
