Every time I glance up at the framed <br />lithograph hanging on my den wall <br />of a bear sitting at its ease browsing <br />through the pages of A Bears Guide <br />I imagine a band of brother bears <br />traveling to a camp on the Yellowstone <br />for a summertime confabulation <br />on the century's greatest writers! <br /> <br />Of course Steinbeck rates four stars <br />followed by Faulkner and Jack London <br />(Yoknapatawpha and frigid Alaska) <br />home territory to shaggy mammals <br />and their fictional canine companions <br />wandering the vast wildernesses <br />of the bears' imagination. <br /> <br />When it came to the merits of such <br />as Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, <br />bear fans of each disagreed, growled <br />and tore up the trees, rolling boulders <br />down the hills into the Yellowstone; <br />but the subject of James Joyce <br />and his stream of consciousness <br />had bears leaving piles of scat <br />in quiet mountain meadows <br />defiling the landscape with <br />ursine opinion of a literary <br />Irishman and his books!<br /><br />Michael Pruchnicki<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-bears-guide/
