Bushed
This poem is abstract, written about an unlucky man living on a mountain who has turned nature against him. In the opening of the poem, a narrator tells us that the man who is the protagonist of the poem has invented the rainbow, only to have it destroyed by lightning and shatter into a mountain lake. Undeterred, the man builds a house on the shore of the lake and commits to surviving there, eating porcupine and living off the land. Initially the man goes out at dawn, however the mountain turns against him, making it impossible for him to go out in the day. He continues to go out at night until the moon and creatures of the night deride and turn against him too. The winds begin sharpening the tip of the mountain into an arrowhead, and the man knows there is nothing to do but wait for it to pierce his heart.
The Bear on the Delhi Road
This poem is about a dancing bear and the two man who captured him and are now attempting to train him. They encountered the bear in the hills where they caught it and are now engaged in the struggle of training it while staying out of reach of its dangerous claws and teeth. The bear merely want to go back to being a bear in nature. It does not want to learn how to dance and wants to exist on four feet and eat berries in the mountains. In the final stanza the narrator declares that all three are joyless in this situation; the bear can no longer be a bear, while the men are forever trying to stay out of reach of its claws.
David
David is a poem in nine parts told by a narrator named Bob who likes to go hiking and mountain climbing with his friend David. Bob and David both love the Canadian outdoors, and the first six sections of the poem detail their mountain climbing exploits, with David teaching the narrator and them successfully completing many hikes. However, in the seventh section the tone of the poem dramatically changes. Bob and David are hiking up the Finger on Sawback when the narrator almost falls due to a crumbling foothold. David saves him, but falls off the side of the trail fifty feet down in the process. In the eighth section, the narrator finds David grievously wounded but alive next to a six hundred foot drop. David begs Bob to kill him because he might not live anyway in the time it takes Bob to get help, and he would surely be paralyzed. In the ninth and final section, Bob agrees to push David over, then tells the other hikers and rangers that David fell all the way to the ice where Bob pushed him.
