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, wold, 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.

Map by Linda Hogan

Photo by Sara Matos

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