We
strove to locate love on a list of symptoms
hyaline
when held to light and found instead
nothing
but bones, and of the sort you relish:
a
kind of bicker in the throat. A jetblack end.
We
thought we saw the dark cursive of a wolf
circling
on sea ice, miles out, in an hour
not
blue, though persuasive and brief.
In
looking back, it was not dog. It wasn’t
anything.
It was not the heart burst forth
but
another part: one for which the words,
the
shafts and shanks, their shifts, have long
been
sung, and in the same breath, lost.
Joan
Naviyuk Kane
