The Moon Speaks of Polar Bears

Forwarded to me by my colleague Ray Gordezky, with whom I am part of a team looking convening people around polar bears in Northern Labrador and Quebec.

The Moon Speaks of Polar Bears

Hailey Leithauser

Some things are better defined

by what they are not,

as when snow heaping the world

replaces the world, becoming

no longer a rooftop, no longer a narrow

gravel shoreline or road,

even in times, in places,

no longer the black breathing

of the sea.

In this way the polar bear

stealing her difficult, beautiful life

from the ridges

and drifts, the colorless

plateau around her,

teaches her young to hunt

by sliding her belly

flat along the frozen light,

blunting her cloudlike

respiration, covering

with one comic paw

the dark flesh of her nose,

so well suited to her artifice

that the oily

seals collecting the ice

are pulled by an intimate

landscape, soundless

and ravenous and white.