Spring 1997
ON HEARING A WOLF’S HOWL
This is no coyote’s warble and bark.
It soars into the canyon’s very stones
and sets the pine needles quivering.
Even the moonlight trembles.
Maybe the wolverine, most fearless
and furtive of all these woods’ creatures,
does not take note. Maybe the bull moose,
placid and massive, merely nods.
But the cliffs stand still and listen,
and the creek picks up its nervous pace.
Deer bedded down in their thickets
test the wind, consider again the avenues of flight.
At my feet in the tent, the dog whimpers.
How much, she must wonder, can any man
be trusted, and what of these walls
that god-cry passes through like a sermon?
Or coming back, its ever fainter echo,
like a whisper, saying what, saying why,
saying who? It is 1:01 a.m.
By moon glow 1 see her silhouette shiver.
By matchlight, her pupils, blue-green
and bottomless, shine back at me.
1 am in them, looking her way,
and something else—movement,
canter, stealth in the blood—
when in the tent’s windless basilica,
among our two held breaths,
the match flutters once, and goes out.
AFTER THE FLOOD
These are the halcyon days
of heavy equipment, the back-up beeps
from bulldozers and dump trucks
more common than bird song, the air,
my wife maintains, so redolent
of testosterone a deep breath
can bring on a beard. Yesterday
we watched two men in a motorboat
salvage lumber from a back-eddy pool.
The river boiled beneath them,
treacherous with deadheads and flotsam.
Neither man wore a life jacket
of course. We’d spread a blanket
under a tree, the kids collected ladybugs
for the garden. I wanted to kiss her neck,
her shoulders bare in the sun for the first time
in months. Your age, she said, or younger.
I reconsidered my cigar. By now
they must have had enough
lumber to frame a small house
or a barn—two-by-sixes, two-by-eights,
straight-grained fir and pine, no common
yard stuff, only select. Imagine
starting over, she said. A gable floated by,
a tatter of black tarpaper trailing.
For a moment, I was a hole in the air,
like the shape of a house
where a house had been, or a room—
a bedroom after love, the kitchen
by meal light and laughter.
Everything gone, she said.
And it was, the scrape and beep of roadwork,
the furtive, early bird songs,
even the calls of the children
at another vivid hatch of bugs.
I was falling into the light, I think, I was
swallowed by silence, when the line came,
the outboard whine driving men
and wood upstream, and one man—
bless his fool heart and mine—
waved his cap at us and whooped.
They had all they could carry
this load. They’d be back
to begin again. I rose
from where I lay and nuzzled her neck.
She laughed and shrank from the itch
of my whiskers, then turned
and kissed me back.
Robert Wrigley is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho. He has published thirteen books of poems, most recently The True Account of Myself As a Bird (Penguin Random House, 2022). He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, on Moscow Mountain.