He sits up in the snow,
raises his head
and howls.
No-one knows where
he came from.
Behind him the alpha female
of the Agate Pack
cuts of his shadow.
It's a Harlequin romance,
domestic drama,
unfathomable mystery.
They tell us
the old packs
are broken,
new ones reforming.
Some have died.
He stretches his neck.
I see his fangs flash.
He is so black
snow and air glitter
an aura about him.
The gray female, prone,
is a steady presence.
Under them
under the thin crust
of the caldera,
swarm multiple quakes.
Will the Big One
blow soon?
Black Wolf howls on and on
to the planet.
His lament echoes
in my brain,
invades my body
and blood,
haunts my dying
and firing cells.
(Lamar Valley, Yellowstone)
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Carolyn Pettit Pinet was born in South Wales and grew up in Oxfordshire, England. She is winner of an Allen Ginsberg Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from King’s College, London University in 1973 and taught in the Department of Modern Languages at Montana State University from 1981 to 2011. She has lived in Bozeman for 33 years. "Black Wolf" was published in her 2014 collection Tangos, Tamaracks, and the Other Woman.