Summer Solstice Splendid Wake Poetry Pop-Up

Afterwards, You Learn                                                                    

by Judith McCombs

Poetry Northwest

The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New

Library of Congress video recording

Afterwards, you learn to say

you were lucky; the last-year’s cubs

stayed safely behind her, breaking

the thickets for berries. Lucky

the wind from the darkening valley

turned cold, and your jacket was heavy,

and zipped to the neck. Lucky

you knew, too late for retreat

in that clearing of downfall and stone,

to drop and go fetal, arm

over neck, playing dead. Lucky

the backpack came off like an arm,

saving most of your arm, and kept her

busy till the grunting cubs

called her back to their feast.

Afterwards you learn to say

that the fault was yours: you were tired,

you were stubborn, making up for lost time

on that summer-growth trail through clearings

and thickets, the wind in your face,

not bothering to sing out or warn

what was there beside you, not waiting

for warnings to reach you.

But sometimes, in sleep, you go back

to that stonefall clearing, that edge

of safety where your scalp hair rises

like hackles for no reason you see,

and there is still enough time to go back

as that dark shape lifts upright

from its tangle of shadow, like a man

in a burly fur suit, peering out,

and you wake with the ghost hairs rising

like fur on your unscarred neck

and perfect right arm.

Judith McCombs grew up nomadic, in a geodetic surveyor’s family. Her poems appear in Delmarva, Potomac & Saranac Reviews, Innisfree, Nimrod (Neruda Award), Poetry, Shenandoah (Graybeal-Gowen Prize); and The Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New. She is active in Word WorksDC, Federal Poets; and arranges the Kensington Row Bookshop’s Poetry Readings.