Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

After a decade and a half of living in Vermont, one morning I thought, “Road signs all over the state and still no sighting of a moose?” Those Beware of Moose signs kept me on the lookout, especially when driving at night. One of my favorite poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” affixed the idea that one loomed around every country road. Through literature and popular culture (think Bullwinkel J. Moose), I had been primed to see the 600 lb. animal in my sleep — sadly, not even there. I believed the antlered creature a myth on par with Vermont’s lake monster, Champ, a giant serpentine creature claimed to have been seen by over 300 people since the 17th century.

Then, one morning, on my way to hear a friend give a reading at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a large four-legged bulk of an animal appeared at the edge of a clearing along the road. I saw it from a distance as I rounded an ascending curve on Route 125. I slowed to a stop, and looked it over. We were eye-to-eye. It was massive and serene.

Window rolled down, I sniffed, as Bishop put it, for the “dim / smell of moose.” The moose watched me with faint interest, looked down the road then back at me. For a long while, I thought the encounter improbable, but here I was: suspended in the moment, expecting transcendence of some kind, some boundless wisdom on a forested path to myself. Isn’t that what we tell ourselves, that the silent dialogue with the great outdoors and its inhabitants will lead us to some visceral connection to the world and deepen our place in it? Always something outside of us, and never within.

I felt a sense of glee even as I overly romanticized and made more of the encounter than it deserved. The moose cocked its ears and turned into the forested path; I continued up the road to a theater full of writers.

Today’s poem reminds me to avoid idealizing nature even if I wish to hold it, believing the experience will someday embed in my body.

An Exchange
by Corey Marks

When she looked up the bear was simply there, watching her.
Berries spilled between her fingers—she counted them falling,
couldn’t help herself, but couldn’t stop them, either. One
after the other caromed through the thicket toward the animal 
like offerings, not accidents, though she thought the bear
already owned the berries, the thicket, the evening, the reverie
wrenched from her head when the earbuds lurched free.
And when the bear left, ambling, unworried, its curiosity,
if that’s what had drawn it near, fizzled, she found her hands
purpled with berries she’d clenched, pulp and seeds
pressed into the spaces between her fingers, into lines
furrowing palms that someone would try to read someday, 
a lover, to divine a future she couldn’t see and wouldn’t believe.
But before that for a while the bear stood openly regarding her,
its fat, dog-like nose twisting and twisting to one side, making sense
of her. Not threatened, or threatening. Not indifferent. Not a gift.

"An Exchange” by Corey Marks from THE ROCK THAT IS NOT A RABBIT © 2023 Corey Marks. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.