No rain all summer--the drought had banished
them from the mountains, creatures craving mast.

Our neighbors warned of three bears, one lame,
snacking at their peach trees, but hot weeks passed

and none had crossed the pavement to our morsel
of oak and pine. One Monday morning, I

drowsed on the couch with my daughter,
watched a wild-haired sun momentarily at rest

in a hammock of branches, when thunder
shook through me. On the deck rail,

some sixteen feet above the starving grass,
a black bear perched, puzzling over birdseed.

My toddler charged and screamed. The bear,
who’d been tilting the squirrel-proof feeder,

spilling grains in his bafflement, paid heed.
He paused, wobbled, thrust a snout toward us,

snuffed the wind. He must have hailed his own
reflection in the pane, a curious

lurching thing, and dimly, behind that, glimpsed
two furless forms akimbo. Our neighbors

said they would not scare; why, then, did he clamber
and shuffle away? Seed not worth the trouble?

Maybe he shrank from his double, a beast
who shrilled a prior claim. Or was he spooked

by scentless ghosts, the way we flickered
behind a light-smeared screen? I trembled

for an hour. My daughter fished for breakfast
from my plate. I wished again to know

what stirs behind her savage, inward look.