Page 101 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

And beats with the furnace

of a four-­‐chambered drum

A red ocean music

rising up

from the underground root

of his own howl.

Notes:

This piece arose as a response to the news that the alpha female of Teanaway Washington’s federally

protected wolf pack was shot and killed. Her death occurred during hunting season, and at the time I

began writing, a suspect had been identified.

Each gesture, creative or destructive, is communication, an opening into conversation with the living

world. In indigenous cultures the hunt has been a conscious conversation of sacred reciprocity, the

prey animals dreamed, honored and thanked. In this piece I imagine the wolf’s response to being shot

at a distance, with a high-­‐powered rifle, without meeting the eyes of the hunter. Perhaps beneath the

projections and mistaken beliefs, the killer unconsciously seeks connection, with the wild, with an

exiled part of himself. Yet, to claim full kinship with the nonhuman others would be to open himself to

the grief and vulnerability of living in an animal body, to being prey, to being poisoned, marginalized,

cast out and attacked. So he reaches out through the wounded language of violence, fearful of giving

up the false security of his stance of separation. As one who has hunted, killed, and listened closely to

the non-­‐ human others, I know in my bones that the living world desires intimacy with humans, that it

responds to our clumsy and mistaken attempts at conversation with grace and power. This poem is an

offering to the clawed, feathered, scaled and human others who are hungry for connection.

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