The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is
“Dogor [is] an 18,000-year-old pup unearthed in Siberian permafrost whose name means ‘friend’ in the Yakut language.” SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 3, 2019
You'd grown three weeks into your mouthfulof teeth, before your eyes froze shut and thenyour throat, but now you are thawing, mopingagain, pretending to be tongue and wet fur and padded feet. My darling whose day has come.From out of your mother you fell into ice, at play,in a pocket of snow, pure love that dug deep,as the mama and the others dissolved quicklyand the father who'd gone to the important placedid not return. It took one night for the worldto harden you into a long bewildered thoughtbut eighteen thousand years before the icelike a pipe, like a vein, burst open—until I sayyour full name: Dogor, small bulb that keepsgrowing new wolf bodies. Dogor, don't harden your eyes and return to the dead. Dogor, don'tfreeze again. Don't fight me or take flight into a thousand motes of ice. Dogor. Don't bite.Remember what you are. Leap into my face. Dozein the crook of my big-boned shoulder. Stay Dogor.
Feature Date
- March 11, 2024
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is” from ICE: by David Keplinger.
Published by Milkweed Editions on August 08, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by David Keplinger.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
David Keplinger is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and Another City(Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the UNT Rilke Prize. His translations include German poet Jan Wagner’s The Art of Topiary (Milkweed, 2017), and Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen’s Forty-One Objects (Bitter Oleander, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Translation Award.
"From Dante to Blake to Emily Dickinson, the poems in Keplinger's latest book summon literary history (and geological history too) in an effort to understand modern life."
—New York Times Book Review
“Keplinger’s Ice travels across time and space, both evoking the history of life on earth and focusing on personal losses, [. . .] There is an arresting intimacy to the icy breadth of this collection, a sense of something unvisited before."
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub
“Reading Ice is like crossing a threshold into timelessness as we navigate the intersections of history, science, literature, and spirituality. Keplinger’s masterful craft connects past and presence while deftly underlining the relationship between loss and astonishment. It’s like the poet says when looking at two horses who seem to be embracing each other in a field: 'I want to love/the world like this'. Keplinger has written a timely, noteworthy collection. A must read.”
—Leo Simonovis, EcoTheo Collective
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