Mae Empson – First, Kill a Bear (with "Medicine Man, Performing His Mysteries over a Dying Man" by George Catlin)

First, kill a bear.

We cannot trespass into a living bear.

But a dead bear can be cut open,
Its skin appropriated,
And a man can climb inside.
He adds the skins of snakes,
Feathers, ropes, and bones,
And carcasses of small game,
Red trim and red button eyes,
Until it’s just right.
Draped beneath that skin,
His face hidden,
He is strong and strange enough
To rattle medicine for a dying man.

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Then, paint the man-bear.

We cannot trespass into the ritual
Without the painter’s hidden face:
His eyes gaze and frame
Through the skin of canvas.

Did you know that he took it?
The painter took the bear-man skin
And wore it to impress the crowds
In his Indian Gallery.

Did you know that they took her?
The little girl who would be
The painter’s mother.
Almost certainly not the same tribe.
But that’s why he wanted
To see Indians and paint them.
Her stories of her stolen days:
The secret origin of his interest.

Trespasses and thefts.
Is any violation ever justified?

Did she have hair of gold?
The stolen girl who would be a mother,
Taken into the house of the man-bears?

I have hair of gold.
I carve words into paper,
Making art from Catlin’s canvas,
Hollowing it out so I can crawl inside
And add my own embellishments—
Snake-skins tied to the sides of a bear.

Will it ever feel just right?

We give ourselves away with our red shoes,
Bloodied by the flesh torn from the skin
Each time someone wanted to crawl into the bear
(Or the canvas, or the culture)
And pretend they could look back at the world
With button eyes facing the sky.

The only one who escapes is the dying man
Whose pain, whose need of transition,
Occasioned the ritual.
The man not apparently
important enough
To paint.









Mae Empson has a Master’s degree in English literature from Indiana University at Bloomington, and graduated with honors in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received the Robert B. House Memorial Prize in Poetry in 1995. She writes both short fiction and poetry. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in anthologies from Prime Books and Innsmouth Free Press. She lives in Seattle, Washington. For additional information, visit her on twitter at www.twitter.com/maeempson or peruse her blog at http://maeempson.wordpress.com.