The Wolf Reader
for Marilyn Hacker
There were the books, and wolves were in the books.
They roamed between the words. They snarled and loped
through stories with bedraggled wolfish looks
at which the hackles rose and the world stopped
in horror, and she read them because she knew
the pleasures of reading, the page too being rapt
with the magic of the fierce, and she could do
the talk of such creatures. So one sunny day
when teacher asked if there were any who
could read, she rose as if the task were play,
to claim the story where she felt at home.
The tale was Riding Hood, the wolf was grey.
The fierceness was the wood where grey wolves roam.
She read it round, she read it through and through.
It was as if the wolf were hers to comb,
like those bedraggled creatures in the zoo
that, trapped behind the bars, would snarl and stride
as you’d expect a page or wolf to do.
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