Charlotte Murray
Ursa Major*
She’s unsure which one of them turns her.
Only that it happens in the flailing lumber
of feet engorging into paws, skin translating
into pelt. Suddenly, she’s just running,
rather than running away. She carries her weight
with pride, gratified to be the largest creature
in the forest. Her bulk makes skittles
of grown men. She has become the reason
mortals are told to stay on marked trails,
to return before darkness wraps its fur
around her starlit hunt. To take lessons
in how to avoid provocation, how to play dead.
How to still their heart like an unwound clock
and pray their pursuer loses interest. It strikes her
that learning to elude the wrath of a bear
is much like being taught how to be a woman.
It’s sixteen years before she encounters a man
who does not freeze or run from her.
A sullen, chisel-jawed youth, he does not waver
even when she hauls herself up into a majestic pillar,
holding the sky aloft like a boulder ready to be thrown.
Ears twitching, she cocks her head. She could crush
his spear-thrusting arm, shake it free from its socket
like spittle. But his eyes, his eyes make her hesitate,
until recognition lurches her away, branches crackling
like surging wildfire behind her. He tracks her
beneath cypress and olive, long after the goatherds
have retreated at the echoing bellow of her maw.
He faces her down on the teetering edge
of a ravine raking its talons down the land.
He squares his feet, raises his spear. She flattens
her ears, scuffs the dry slope with her great paw,
knowing as she does so that she will not charge.
That’s all the time her son needs to steady his aim.
But what pierces her between the dark matt
of her eyes is not death, but light. Not the weep
of blood, but the timeless kiss of space.
*In Greek mythology, the constellation of Ursa Major is identified with the nymph, Callisto. After being tricked by Zeus and giving birth to his son, she was transformed into a bear.