ANSWERING THE WOLF

ANSWERING THE WOLF

Answering the wolf.

Its agony, my own.

Its long howl of irreproachable pain

enough to silence the mountains

with trepidation before something holy.

Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses

pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.

The bounty of two happy hunters

kneeling beside their rifles

as if something had been accomplished

it would be worth telling their children about.

Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.

It can do this to anything that lives.

From blue algae to Auschwitz,

Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.

Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,

twenty-five million famished children a year,

an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.

Beyond wanting to know why

there’s this black spot

in people’s hearts and minds,

where sentience turns rabid,

where intelligence seems

the most inspired enabler of death,

where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,

how do you answer the innocence

of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?

Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.

You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out

with an X on your forehead

for a thousand excruciating transformations.

You kill a wolf. And the rivers

will turn against you and bide their time

until you come down to the water to drink

from your own blood-stained reflection.

The sun will begrudge you a shadow.

The wind feel fouled by your smell

like dead meat in your own house well.

Even the maggots who will come

to your heart one day

like undertakers and garbage-collectors

will look upon it not

as the virtue of a noble enemy

but as an undertaking that’s beneath them.

They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,

even the white-tailed buck laments

this atrocity of psychotic caprice

that slaughters simply because it can.

I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these

and the stars dip their spears in poison.

And I will dance around the fire with you

mad with grief at this wounded eye of life

and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask

to regret everything about me that is

pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.

To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.

Do this to our own. Do this to natives.

Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water

they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately

to themselves when there’s no one left to care or notice.

These kill to eat.

These eat to kill. You and all like you

who did and condone this, I ask you,

what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?

You never ravened for the meat;

was it their death that glutted your heart?

Were you compensating for some hidden impotence

giddy with the knowledge you could

extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?

Were you urinating on your own wombs,

the graves of your ancestors because

you’re the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?

Are you angry at life because you were born?

Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?

I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos

you’ve violated like thresholds with your boots on,

bruising sacred ground without knowing

where it is you walk or the risk you take,

the danger you will encounter,

because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind

robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind

insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind

to find you when you least expect it

from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,

and exonerate the act in the abstract.

These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each

with a mystic specificity of its own,

wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal

each the work of some unknown muse of life,

the spontaneity of some lavish genius,

the inspiration of the same dark mother

that never creates the same masterpiece twice.

These had seeing, mind, emotion.

These had been touched by the mystery of life

and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains

offered their delirium up to the moon

like drunks beneath a vacant window

singing to their own reflections. These

accepted their homelessness in this strange place

without doing it any harm as if

there were no other place they could belong to.

These were at peace with themselves and the earth

in a way you weren’t born with the courage to imagine.

These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.

These were noble without lording it over anyone.

Were they executed for their innocence?

Was there not enough room in your cage

for their kind of freedom? Did you envy

an understanding they had among each other

you haven’t enjoyed once in the last twenty years

you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy

staring back at the glass eyes of the animals

looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo

with the pity of the unaccusing

that anything that’s ever lived

could be so full of self-hatred,

so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves

in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,

from blue algae on over to blue whales,

could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,

could be so vindictively blind

they’d rather shoot the eyes out of the stars

and finger the braille of the bullet holes

they’ve put in the side of their coffins

like a mailbox with a return address on it

than open their own and read the writing on the wall.

Does Cain still blame God

that his sacrifice was unacceptable?

The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?

The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?

So you murder your brother

and then you murder the animals

as if they somehow let you down.

And in the death shroud of the dark mother

she sends a crow not a dove,

not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome

to teach you how to bury the dead,

to teach you how to sow the earth you’ve salted

with meat and bullets and how they only bloom

and come to fruition in you

like self-inflicted wounds square

in the third eye of your own infertility.

There used to be hunters wise enough to know

the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift

not something they ripped off like a petty thief.

Now when they catch a whiff of you coming

it isn’t a hunter they run from but

that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death

that clings to the skin of an undertaker

who moonlights as a serial killer

in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

PATRICK WHITE