MAP
by Linda Hogan
| This is the world so vast and lonely without end, with mountains named for men who brought hunger from other lands, and fear of the thick, dark forest of trees that held each other up, knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them and spoke an older tongue, and the tongue of the nation of wolves was the wind around them. Even ice was not silent. It cried its broken self back to warmth. But they called it ice, wolf, forest of sticks, as if words would make it something they could hold in gloved hands, open, plot a way and follow.This is the map of the forsaken world. This is the world without end where forests have been cut away from their trees. These are the lines wolf could not pass over. This is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own.There are names each thing has for itself, and beneath us the other order already moves. It is burning. It is dreaming. It is waking up. |
| From DARK. SWEET.: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2014) © 2014 by Linda Hogan. Used with the permission of Coffee House Press. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 6, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets |