Wolves Out Tonight Poem by Patrick White

Wolves out tonight.
The smart dogs are stay-at-homes.
No berries. The bears have torn up
the garbage dumps and heaped
what fat they could manage in caves
to sleep their hunger away
in whatever a bear dreams of.
The natives are predicting a hard winter
by counting beads on an abacus of holly.
Corrugated drifts of the first snow,
wavelength after wavelength of a frozen tide
even if you were to take it at the high
would lead to nowhere but here
where the common mullein
whose cobs and towers of yellow flowers
are now rags of light
thrown to the back of the closet of the sun,
its grey-green felt leaves
too brittle and withered
to insulate an Ojibway’s moccasin.
And there, Jupiter rising in the east,
every planet so sublimely immersed
in its own business, it hasn’t got time
to interfere in the worldly affairs of this one.
Here, six months of the year,
earth in a coma of its own
and everything waiting like a relative
beside a rumpled white hospital bed
for spring to open
the eyelids of the flowers again.
The wind whips and spurs
the flanks of the horses
that have dug their hoofs
into the frozen earth
standing in the meagre fields,
bridges to nowhere,
half-finished wharfs in the snow,
the wind whipping
their ice-encrusted manes
like a cat o’ nine tails
stinging the soft lustre
of their wounded eyes.
Wolves out tonight
down by the lake
searching the cattails for muskrat,
an agony of longing in their howling
that’s older and deeper than pain.
The moon almost full in Taurus.
Does it ever answer them
like a snowy owl
high in a basswood tree nearby
or the echo of a wavelength
long after the loon has gone
it left as a keepsake in a locket
like the sea leaves itself in a shell?
Languages in a polyglot wilderness
you can only listen to
but never speak until
you let the silence speak for you.
Tracks in the first snow
like a junkie’s arm
leading away from a shell-shocked juniper
each with glyphs and scripts of their own.
Just like poetry.
Line by line.
There goes the hare.
Here comes the fox.
Or tonight, more likely, a wolf.