Wolverine, Some Movies Work & Other Poetry

By DB Jonas

Credit: Open Art

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Wolverine 

Homage to Barry Lopez 

Courtesan of shadow, doyenne of surprise, 
this is the creature that maybe never was, 
known to us only by her charismatic absences,  
by all we’d only half-glimpsed, mistaken,  
or maybe even vaguely dreamed. 

A stunning shock of cannon-shot, a whisper  
of patchouli in the air, a snarling paradox  
enshrouded in the tangled brush, she taunts us  
with a flash of russet flame that lacerates the snowbanks  
of synecdoche and slips from metaphor like mercury. 

Fugitive field-particle of our imagining, she’s only free 
to make her absence known at some specific time  
or in a certain place, but never both at once, 
however clever our retreat, however long we may  
have lain in wait. Inhabiting a world of tracings,  
signs and scat, in her domain we all are creatures caught 
in the grip of a dubious past, captured by the escape  
of that which, barely seen, was just as likely missed. 

They say one day she wandered into a man-laid trap, 
this fugitive wavelet of antimatter gathered in a bottle, 
and roaring like a turbine tore her flesh to shreds  
against the unforgiving steel, so much so that, 
once subdued, she’d reduced herself by nearly half, 
and strewn her cage with mucus, blood and musk,  
with livid hunks of sparkling fur, uprooted claw,  
and the scattered jagged detritus of shattered tooth. 

And in the end, they engineered for her a tidy 
domicile to replicate her habitat, or so they said, 
and families came to view the beast but only saw 
the sign outside her empty-seeming space, a sign 
that read The Wolverine, because with no way out 
she’d had no choice in life but to weasel through  
some wormhole in the Real and find a passage inward. 

The keepers said they saw her shining coat grow dun 
and darkling eye grow dim beneath their probings  
and inspections on that lengthy day of first captivity,  
as she lay spent and etherized upon her mat, her dusky 
fires fading in the sinkhole-weeks that followed,  
passive in the face of overwhelming force,  
yet revealing nothing, resisting nothing, escaping  
into their very grasp, leaving nothing for us 
in that ferocious wake but her relentless absence,  
this fiercely uncommunicative, eternally savage  
corpse behind. 

Some Movies Work 

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time 
—John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn 

Some movies work 
the way a ballgame works 
when we’ve stepped from the stream 
of busy day, when we’ve stepped off the clock 
into the blinding green and everyone 
has tossed that ticking wristwatch well away  
into the quiet air of evening at the park 
to sit where time has lost all meaning 
and our living’s measure only lives 
in the timeless round of at-bats, signals, 
signs and innings, and the only evidence  
of the expiring light is a long sharp shadow  
inching unnoticed into the outfield,  
unruffled by the ponderous drama of the game, 
by the eccentric ceremonials of the batter in his box, 
the sudden crack of ash-wood at the plate, 
the oddly distant roar of the incantatory crowd,  
and the nervous scuffling antics,  
the gimlet stares and sets and blazing deliveries 
of our hometown pitcher on the mound. 

Some movies work like this. 
What wonder some just can’t sit still 
to see a careful man adjust his razor at the sink, 
to hear a woman softly humming at the window 
while rustling maples darken in the street. 
Some folks, I understand, are left unsettled 
by the emptiness of time, the vacant hours, 
the countless scoreless innings of this life. 
They find it disconcerting to be dropped  
into a world without action, without purpose, 
lacking clear direction, lacking plot. 

Believe me, I do understand, but not a lot, 
and I do have to wonder why it is they ever  
even feel they need to make a showing at the park, 
when all they really have to see and know 
is what we all will know as we file back out  
into the saturated night, into the stream,  
to the car left waiting  
somewhere in the dark. 

Jeremiad 

In all that is possible, there is nothing  
more wondrous than what is. 
—al-Ghazālī