I’ve had wolves on the brain. I forget where the obsession started. I know Sabeth made a great etching of a wolf during our workshop a few weeks ago. Around the same time I had the urge to track down Maxine Kumin’s poem “After Love” to quote it to someone:
Afterwards, the compromise
Bodies resume their boundaries
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.
Then I started listening to Tender Forever a bunch, especially “Tiny Heart and Clever Hand,” in which wolves make an appearance. Then I was thinking about all this on a walk to the library, where on the new fiction shelf I noticed 2 fantasy novels about people living with wolves.
Anyway this is what came of it:
I’ve been thinking about a wolf as a stand-in for a person, in particular one who doesn’t express emotion easily, but Becca pointed out you could also read it as a statement about habitat destruction and aerial hunting.
gotta love TF!