The Truth about Polar Bears

Shaved, a polar bear would be a giant

tar baby, his skin the impenetrable color

of anthracite. Each hair is as transparent

as perpetual sunlight slanting across

the Arctic Circle. As he lumbers over the far

reaches of latitude, his loose skin shakes

his layered coat, like a carpet of icicles,

to catch every glance and glare of light

from ice field, flake, and glacier. And all

this dazzle of white he flails about is a lie;

those clear hairs seem to mime the dense

clarity of snow and ice, reflecting every scrap

of sunlight available, when in truth

they pull the sun down, focus the spectrum

compressed, to gather heat to his obsidian skin.

Call it a lie, this deception the bear

knows nothing of, or say it is the truth,

reduced to black and white reversed,

the world made simple as the history of ice.