Paige Quiñones

We About Wolf

First, we compared languages.
You say English doesn’t have enough words;
each finger is merely finger, each toe toe.
But your word for drowning sounds
too much like utopia, and I think
of a canoe cutting a dark lake, evergreen
phantoms lurching preserved at its bed.
In profile, you resemble a man I once loved.

Same jawline, same eyelid folds. Just missing
his beard’s small whirlpool under the chin.
The dreams about him come fast, and I wake
expecting to feel some different heaviness
beside me, the fantasy of it lingering past morning
the way a moth might mistake the moon
for closer light. Each time, he’s farther.

My favorites are your idioms. Same idea,
different route. How about speak of the devil? I ask.
Yours is better, I think: mi o volku, volk iz gozda.
We about wolf, wolf from forest.
As if I could merely believe in the word at a treeline
and the animal emerges to make himself true.