the fulcrum and the bear

New Blog: What is a fulcrum and a bear?

A bit of a strange name for a blog I suppose – when I first thought of the idea for a blog and was tossing around names, I kept coming back to a poem I wrote a few years ago – published in this year’s Santa Fe Literary Review (out now). The more I kept thinking about the poem, the more I thought that it holds within it the seeds of a philosophy - a way of looking at the world - that is what I would want for my blog.

To me the poem is about an urge toward change – not just political or economic change - but a shift of perception that touches on everything. In the world of my poem the fulcrum of this change is not from the world of technology, not made from the usual materials of our current age  – it is something from the earth itself: a chthonic energy.

Chthonic comes from the Greek, khthon, one of the Greek words for earth -  particularly in or under the earth. In psychology it is used as a term for the spirit of nature within the psyche. My own definition is a bit more complicated – the poem probably does a better job of heading toward defining it than I can here. And it is part of what I want to explore in this blog. So here’s the poem to launch the blog … where the main theme … in a really eclectic way…will be about the question of who are we as human beings on planet earth.

The fulcrum and the bear

There is a fulcrum. It is not made of dirt or iron. It is thin as rain, the whisper of a snowflake riding down the divide. 

It is not a fist. 

I will tell you this: it is not patient, not going to spend eternity stitching shoes together or clipping coupons from the Sunday Times. 

Where is the lever?

It is not as simple as that. But I have been dreaming lately of old women abandoned in the back rooms of houses, left in closets to die of thirst. These grandmothers have a thread of red cotton tied to their ring finger. They die alone but the small rectangular bundles of bones continue to tell stories.

I’ve never met a bear but I think there is one near the house. I hold the lamp out into the dark and see the shadows of trees collide with trees. He must be in hibernation now, midwinter, but his soul’s out wandering. He circles, blows a little warm air onto the ruff of the neighbor’s hound, who bays as if his skin were being split down the middle. 

If the bear wandered, lonely, up the stairs to my bedroom, I would give myself to him.