In Late Winter

"In Late Winter" is the result of a collaboration between poetry and my own performance. Several weeks ago, I read the poem "The Bear" by Galway Kinnell. About a man who crawls into a bear carcass for warmth and protection, the poem stuck with me.

Around this same time, I made a costume out of elk hyde, taxidermy legs, and horse tail, intending to become a hybrid animal-human, whose existence is impossible and fraught. The creature's flesh became a second skin for my own, my bare exposed skin juxtaposed with its furry thickness in the cold. As I roamed around the snow in the costume, the only warmth available was inside of the head of the creature. While my feet and hands numbed, my head and upper body found heat and comfort in the head of the creature I was becoming, like the main character in the poem I had been reading.

The performance, although not initially inspired by the poem, seemed to re-enact the poem to some degree. It becomes a variation of the story of the person after he has climbed into the carcass. I am not sure which came first, though-was the idea there, or did the poem plant it in my head? As I edited the video, I edited lines of the poem in with it, literally splicing out sections to tell a new story, the story of this creature that I was becoming. The splices of poem I use tell a story tailored to my gestures and actions. These are, in the tradition of William Burroughs, the cut-ups of the poem, snippets and lines from the original cut and rearranged to have a different meaning.

In addition to Burroughs, the collage-editing process reminded me of the way Kathy Acker developed characters through combining text and image, as well as adopting literary personas. Using text in my work is entirely new, and I became interested in the way little bits of descriptive text could act as bumpers to the following scenes. Kinnell's words became scenes in themselves that the viewer would have to imagine against their black backgrounds, and then relate these words to the imagery of me in costume on screen. Further, I felt that in putting on this costume, I began to embody this invented creature, learning its movements and behaviors, and, in the context of the poem, I became the main character that climbs inside the bear. Like Acker, I developed a character based on fiction.

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The Bear

1
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2
I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

3
On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.

4
On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.

5
And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.

6
Until one day I totter and fall --
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.

7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived?


from Body Rags, Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).