Canis Lupus

Dec 20 2017

The dead wolf

seemed so much smaller

than that beast who howls

beyond the circle of light.

The lifeless form

so unnaturally still.

His muscles slack,
piercing eyes
now sightless slits,
the long limbs
of a distance runner
surprisingly thin
limply splayed-out.

His ribs are clearly visible,

and the thick grey fur

has turned brittle and dull;

not unexpected

in the middle of a winter

when prey is scarce

and the cows fat.

Not a lone wolf

but a pack animal, just like us.

Who will be missed, and even mourned

when he fails to return home.

Who had to be shot,

for protection

a lesson

petty vengeance, perhaps.

Still, no one takes pleasure

in the death of wolf;

who looks so dog-like, lying there in the cold,

heat bleeding out of him

the blood-stained snow.

Meanwhile, the cows steam-up the barn,

the farmer lies down with his wife,

a full moon rises

in cloudless sky.

And you can hear the manic howling

beyond the circle of light.

The golden retriever growls, barks, struts,

peering out the window

on high alert.

The atavistic urge of dogs,

hackles up

at the scruff of her neck, the base of her spine.

And something fierce

in her tightly focused eyes,

a wildness

that even the farmer

would hardly recognize.

This is based on a true story. So the photos are also authentic; not the boilerplate pics I usually download from Google images. (I say “based”, of course, because I've taken a number of poetic and narrative liberties.)

It was hard to look at the body of the dead wolf, an animal that so closely resembles our own beloved dogs. And also an animal with which we ourselves so easily identify: an intelligent apex predator living as a social animal in a tightly-knit group. It's a difficult trade-off, even though one wants to be sympathetic to the farmer: the lives of the fat dull cows over such a charismatic creature; the numbingly domestic over the wild and independent; the plain and pedestrian over this feared beast of myth and legend.

On the other hand, the wolves have been known to brazenly take some local dogs. So I can't help but think that one fewer wolf is one less threat to my own precious pets; who would, of course, be helpless if confronted by a wolf, distant relative or not.

I quite like beyond the circle of light (which, a careful reader will notice, is repeated, and so acts as a kind of recurrent leitmotif). There was so much I could have gone on about in order to contrast the sense of threat of the dark foreboding wilderness with the familiar and tame and civilized. But these five words, by implication, do it all. I think they convey with elegant compression and simplicity the image of us huddled within out small circle of light, besieged all around by encroaching and unknowable dangers – both the real and the imagined. And simply referring to the howling sound of a wolf pack barking at the moon immediately elicits the thrill and and threat; no need to actually describe either its quality or our visceral response. This is a good example of two cardinal rules of poetry I find myself repeatedly falling back on. First: show, don't say. And second: trust the reader; let the reader be rewarded by doing some of the work herself.

I chose golden retriever because I think this breed offers a great contrast with her feral relative: a trusting, gentle, attentive animal bred to a very human aesthetic of beauty, from her luxurious coat to her long raised tail and floppy ears. But, of course, within her genetics lies a seed of wildness and wolfishness: a good note for the poem to end on.