WALKING THE BEAR

A poem by Star Coulbrooke

Foreword:

Rivers are all about renewal. No matter how we dam them, divert them, shunt them through concrete or steel, they renew themselves eventually. Rivers replenish. Rivers come back with a force that looks like destruction, but then they bring new life, whether we are here to see it or not.

“Walking the Bear” will always be relevant because it is about the history and character of the Bear River, the inevitable renewal of which is vital to the Great Salt Lake and therefore to the lives of birds all over the world.

I walk on water, take the river

from its high Uintas

down Utah’s cascades,

wander Wyoming’s meanders,

Montpelier’s meadows,

to Soda’s hair-pin curve

where thirty-thousand years ago

lava turned the Bear

away from Blackfoot’s Snake

and sent it down to Grace.

Doubling back from Gem Valley

to Cache, I walk the river’s cobbled bed

where tributaries surge, rowdy Cub,

Little Bear, Beaver-headed Logan,

six-tined fork of Blacksmith. 

hawthorn and chokecherry,

lifting like a heron over dams

and sluggish lakes

that halt the river’s breath.

I walk the Bear all summer

as it builds strength again,

widens into marshes, joins

in lush bird-heavy congress

with the great peculiar Salt,

Down the length of floodplains

I pass, through wetlands

of cattails and bulrushes,

to bottomlands leveled and drained,

where the river silts in, slows down,

its honeyed pace tamed for grain.

On the river’s gliding current

I travel miles each step,

a dreamlike passage

through cedar and cottonwood,

a lake that would surely die

if not for this river, this path,

this milk and honey.

Star Coulbrooke, Bear River Activist and Inaugural Poet Laureate of Logan City, coordinates the Helicon West Featured Reader/Open Reading Series. She is author of three full length poetry collections: Thin Spines of Memory, Both Sides from the Middle, and City of Poetry.

“Walking the Bear” is published in Walking the Bear, Outlaw Artists Press, Price, Utah, 2011; Deseret Magazine, July/August 2024, Vol. 04 | No. 36; and The Nomad 2024