Poetry by Carol Deering

Two black bears/jaunty & buoyant, burst from the pines/sow first/bounding euphoric across the road/a hundred yards from me.

Driving south through the Rockefeller
          strip, enduring the strobe-lit   

lodgepole sun,
         I thought my eyes had painted them

to ease the ache of light:
         Two black bears

jaunty & buoyant, burst from the pines,
          sow first

bounding euphoric across the road
          a hundred yards from me. Mine,

                  the only car around.   

She was playing
         with her yearling. I slowed to nearly

nothing. The smile that sprung to my face

         shone all day.  

The sheen of impenetrable beauty,
          the spunk to run and snuffle joy

across a feral home. No bluff, no grunt
           no notice of me.   

           Gratefully,

I was free to roam!  

Carol L. Deering has twice received the Wyoming Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2016, judge Rebecca Foust; 1999, judge Agha Shahid Ali). Her poetry appears in online and traditional journals, and in the recent anthology Blood, Water, Wind & Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers.  https://www.caroldeering.com