Often There Are Bears

Sometimes it’s a school play—I’m Hamlet, not Antigonus; I’m about to go on—and I have no idea what I’m doing, how I’m going to fake iambs, but somehow I have to answer, stand, unfold myself.   

But then the bears. Stalking the woods around my childhood home, and the bottom half of the Dutch door has been left open, and the claws are coming in. 

Bears around the house, and how can I make it from the barn to the door without their lumbering rush to maul me. 

Bears at the window. Bears beneath the tree and coming up. 

Bears on the runway as I wait to board a small plane to Los Angeles, a city I have no ties to, just a long-ago lover, and not a very good one, whom I never think about except the morning after I have this dream. 

And then, a bear wearing a bathrobe in the closet at the foot of the bed I’m sleeping in. 

Over my teeming head: the ceiling, the roof, the night sky. And to the north, if it is not deep winter, the Great Bear herself, older than the Bible, older than Homer. Once the nymph Callisto, punished for a god’s lust and a broken vow, she endlessly circles the north. 

And the bears descend through my dreams. 

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019, and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars, was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, Shenandoah, and Fourth Genre. Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s low-residency MFA program and Goucher’s MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website: randonbillingsnoble.com.  

This essay originally appeared in Gargoyle, issue 74 (2019).