Bear-Market Poem by Katharina Schultens

The second of my dancing bears would run half-marathons.
Like Laokoon, he had his life wrapped up in bonds
yet twitched to lift his paws, testing each in turn,
struggled to start as the beat kicked in,
tentative, shifting his weight from foot to foot;

his arm slipped round the small of my back, digits pushed
through downy fur, his hat flopped over one eye,
his waistcoat: fallen open, exposing the bulge of his belly,
the soft pink that I felt I knew so well.
-
The second of my dancing bears
left his children far behind him
when his greed poured
ruthless through the ring;
his pride gone down the plug-hole;
apart from the tail he'd tied on tight,
that I just gently tugged...

This second dancing bear lost everything;
a ceaseless flow of memories, collected
in conical flasks, to fizz, to be re-drunk
no faster than the rate of their flowing back out;
he paled, at length forgetting even who he was.
-
My own thoughts returned to the first.
My mind had never stopped missing the first.
My memories yet hazy over
what he knew I had not ever known.

The first of my dancing bears stayed always one step ahead.
The first of my dancing bears was a superior sprinter.
The first of my dancing bears slipped from his skin
in some far away land - showed himself to be no bear at all.

We had long sewn up all our wounds,
not got further than the two-hundred-day-mark;
our coded cries soon swallowed in the woods.

All summer we'd lain nestled like spoons, my first bear
and I, in the long meadow-grass around the public pool,
his stubble catching the soft skin of my hollows;
his roughness, archived, knew not how to recognise the sun.
-
As such a glitch grew up within the graph.
The guidelines fell away, exposing the fault.

I thought: it must be over.
I thought: now I will dance.

I have not the strength to call up any more bears.

Translated by J.O. Morgan