I want to read another poem from Kicking the Leaves now,
but one that has nothing to do with New Hampshire.
What it has to do with is perhaps a little mysterious
even to me.
It's a narrative poem.
I've written very few narrative poems.
It's a dramatic monologue.
I've written a few of those over my life.
But this is one.
It came, and it came in, for me, what
was almost an impetuous rush.
It was written in two or three months.
Incredible.
It's called Wolf Knife, and it's a narrative
of an Arctic explorer.
Essentially, it's made up.
I have an epigraph for whatever it is under the title saying
from the journals of Sea of Hoyt,
and then give dates, and so on.
And I made it up.
I was delighted then when the reviewer in the New York Times
called it a found poem.
Well, it is true that I took the possibility
of the story, the suggestion of the story,
from the journals of an Arctic explorer.
Someone named Hall actually, but I'm not
related as far as I know.
So this is entirely spoken by a man--
by a Victorian man, mid to late 19th century man.
Not me at all.
Sometimes I wish I didn't know I did make it up.
It's a bit grim.
In mid-august, in the second year
of my first polar expedition, the snows and ice of winter
almost upon us.
Kantiuk and I-- I'm sorry, Kantiuk
is to be an Eskimo name.
There are a couple of other Eskimo words
which I think are explained by their context.
Kantiuk and I attempted to dash by sledge
along Crispin Bay searching again for relics
of the Franklin expedition.
Now a storm blew, and we turned back.
And we struggled slowly in snow lest we depart land and venture
onto ice, from which a sudden fog and thaw would abandon us
to the providence of the sea.
Near nightfall, I thought I heard snarling behind us.
Kantiuk told me that two wolves lean
as the bones of a wrecked ship had followed us
for the last hour and snapped their teeth
as if already feasting.
I carried but the one charge in my rifle,
since approaching the second winter we ration stores.
As it turned dark, we could push no further.
And made camp in a corner of ice hammocks.
And the wolves stopped, also, growling just
past the limits of vision, coming
closer until I could hear the click of their feet on ice.
Kantiuk laughed and remarked that the wolves appeared
to be most hungry.
I raised my rifle prepared to shoot
the first that ventured close, hoping to frighten the other.
Kantiuk struck my rifle down, and said again
that the wolves were hungry and laughed.
I feared that my old companion was mad,
here in the storm among ice hammocks stalked by wolves.
Now Kantiuk searched in his pack and extricated two knives.
Turnoks, the Innuits called them, which by great labor
were sharpened on both sides to a sharpness like the edge
of a barber's razor.
And approached our dogs, and plunged both knives
into the body of our youngest dog who had limped all day.
I remember that I considered turning my rifle on Kantiuk
as he approached, then passed me,
carrying knives red with the gore of our dog.
Who had yowled, moaned, and now lay
expiring, surrounded by curious cousins and uncles
possibly hungry.
And thrust the knives handle down into the snow,
immediately he left the knives.
The vague gray shapes of the wolves
turned solid out of the darkness and the snow,
and said ravenously to licking blood from the honed steel.
The double edge of the knives so lacerated the tongues
of the starved beasts, that their own blood poured
copiously forth to replenish the dog's blood,
and they ate more furiously than before while Kantiuk laughed,
and held his sides laughing.
And I laughed also.
Perhaps in relief that providence
had delivered us, yet again.
Or perhaps, under conditions of extremity
far from Connecticut, finding these creatures acutely
ridiculous.
So avid to swallow their own blood.
First one and then the other collapsed
dying, bloodless in the snow, black with their own blood.
And Kantiuk retrieved his turnoks and hacked lean meat
from the thigh of the larger wolf, which we ate, gratefully,
blessing the Creator, for we were hungry.
[CLAPPING]
I'm on record as saying someplace or other that the--
a great theme of lyric poetry almost never
acknowledged is cannibalism.
I find it in Eliot.
I find it in Robert Frost.
I find it everywhere.
I find it in me.
Not that I mean that's the be all and end all of that poem.
Sometime after I had written it and was still
quite puzzled by it, Robert Bly explained to me what it meant.
And I have never told anybody, because I'm afraid he's right.