It still feels naughty, like getting off scot free from an infiltration
Of a private, secretive, night-dark natural world
Where I had no business to be,
And look! I’ve come back with a trophy of my triumph
For your consideration. What it trumpets
Is not privacy, secrecy, or darkness, but wolf,
Plain and simple wolf.
Here, you can touch it.
Here in this little room in Megalopolis
I have the plaster casts once made in daylight
Of wolf tracks and of that entirely other
Domain of the timber wolves. I went somewhere once,
Took a hike and mixed some plaster of Paris,
All within an isolated, forbidding otherworld
With its whiffs of risk and danger.
I was there, and look, I can touch it.
