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William Matthews - The Bear At The Dump
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Amidst the too much that we buy and throw 
away and the far too much we wrap it in, 
the bear found a few items of special 
interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon, 
the bone from a leg of lamb. He’d rock back 
lightly onto his rear paws and slash 
open a plastic bag, and then his nose— 
jammed almost with a surfeit of rank 
and likely information, for he would pause— 
and then his whole dowsing snout would 
insinuate itself a little way 
inside. By now he’d have hunched his weight 
forward slightly, and then he’d snatch it back, 
trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He’d look 
around. What a good boy am he. 
The guardian of the dump was used 
to this and not amused. “He’ll drag that shit 
every which damn way,” he grumbled 
who’d dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit 
where the town paid to contain it. 
The others of us looked and looked. “City 
folks like you don’t get to see this often,” 
one year-round resident accused me. 
Some winter I’ll bring him down to learn 
to love a rat working a length of subway 
track. “Nope,” I replied. Just then the bear 
decamped for the woods with a marl of grease 
and slather in his mouth and on his snout, 
picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been 
cute before, slavering with greed, his weight 
all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck 
up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped 
like a huge, furry pear), but richly 
fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone 
into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.
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