For Ernesto Garcia 1967–1995
And I have to wonder what life means since that day I heard
Ernesto scrambled
out of the locked ward on Hillmont the same afternoon a distressed bear
lumbered into the warren
of little houses off The Avenue, deputies chasing him, a three-hundred
pound infant padding
toward mistaken water. It was one of those mornings a fat pale moon still
rolls in the turquoise
and a woman stoops to pick up the Star, early edition—Scientist awakens
bacteria in gut of bee
doomed in amber eons ago . . . And next to that, another story—Ernesto
in the last shape ever
burned into anyone’s eye, a shot his buddy snapped, not grasping
it was final.
Ernesto knew not to smile for the birdie, to look past the apparatus to a place
where words trail off
in a tangle of fireweed and sumac, all that grief where nothing human holds.
Sundown, a big dark man
barefoot in a hospital gown, cornered up past the parking lot, copter
thumping overhead,
shouting through tears What am I supposed to do until it became
the moan rumbling
through a bear in his sleep . . . He crumpled when the gun fired, his mouth
filling with nothing.
I keep seeing him make for the hills behind the mental ward, bare feet
sliding on bits of quartz
around islands of cactus—running the shadow pulse of an older world—
his stare
clean and dangerous in the scrub laurel. Three hours inside city limits
before they hit the bear
with a tranq dart—he crumpled when the gun fired,
unconscious—
they winched him in a sling and trucked him deep into the wild. Maybe that
bear’s alive, dreaming
in his bones or shambling through the understory, one huge paw
shoveling for grubs,
light snowing the way it does at those altitudes around his dark head,
maybe he’s snuffling
air, learning to savor wind, beginning to taste what it takes to go on,
what life wants . . .