The morning is a thought field ignited by bird lark; a river of cerebration. I contemplate horse skins of light––the marigold sun through a prism of glass. One child emerges, then another. Their soporific faces reveal a discernment. I take from every gap ready to pursue the stratosphere of not myself. Between inhalations of hope, their focal eyes, their tender skin, is a euphonic indrawn sea. Let me trace these inner abrasions; a deaf-brae of not discourse.

//

I tread, retread repetitive lines––only in the margins am I wolf-blood. That’s what my daughter says, she knows, has known the primal horde at the root. Like menses––it will come soon. My daughter is articulate with a hormone charge. In this inarticulate world of anxiety that pervades her being she plays a game of running ‘blood from the ground.’ It is as if the moon is doubled, hung off the lobes of her fallopian tubes as ceremonial bling. My fresh pup is growing bold––treated to all of my luminescence. She plays ‘wolf notes’ on her guitar to teach me how to locate the score I had mislaid in my own heart.

//

What is wolfish, intractable? Reading for the bones, relocating a medicine story, of lore, diminished by conquest, religion and capital. Petitioning Loba, drawing on a kinship line, an auditory nerve––by the light of my ovaries I sing this song. A ‘liquid howl,’ drives rivers between rivers of soul, a vatic bird song that I mine. I go down to the wound as if I already know how. As if I’d done this many times with a flame in my heart––slipping into wolf-blooms.

‘Woolf notes’ and ‘blood from the ground’ come from the poem ‘Wolf Notes’ by Judith Beveridge, collected in Wolf Notes, 2007 [2003], Giramondo: Sydney. pp.39-42.

‘Liquid Howl’ is taken from ‘Wolf Cento’ collected in Trace by Simon Muench. Black Lawrence Press.