entre chien et loup

[dukealien]

I am posting this here as a continuation of a discussion in the intensive forum about using foreign idiomatic phrasing to create English poetry.

This poem was created based of the French idiom entre chien et loup


between a dog and wolf

When I first heard the scratching at the door
I knew I shouldn’t answer
but I opened it and the night rain growled
and the thunder was my father’s face
in the dark sky and the wolf limped through
smelling like sour milk and old tires,
muddying the carpet with its blooded paws.
He took his place on the couch in the great room.

My daughter’s whimpers shake
her small body as she sits on my lap.
We watch her cartoons together now
on the floor pretending not to notice
the low snarl that gurgles up behind us.

At dinners, we keep the lights low
but the shadows are worse
and the pulse of its lungs scrapes
the air between us. We cannot leave
and we cannot speak of it
for it is one of us now.

When critiquing (which I'm not doing here) I sometimes say a poem is "atmospheric" because it's heavy on description but doesn't make much sense.  Here you're playing with the idea of "dog and wolf" and the play is with descriptions.  One nice thing about a work like this is how *not* telling leaves space for interesting ambiguities:  does the last line mean the guest is one of three, or (in) one of (us) two?

The obvious way to assemble the images is two people, father (or mother) and daughter, plus the awful wolf their visitor/tenant.  But reassemble it in other ways (it's a dog house, but the old nature returns) and it changes.  Turn it around:  the hour of dog and wolf is not so much when it becomes impossible to tell them apart - even by posture and the way they move, something like the ur-commando morning moment when it becomes possible to tell a black thread from a white - but the hour when the nature of what you meet changes from domesticated to feral.  As a cop said, at night "the complexion of the streets changes."

And turning it around further, what does the wolf feel as it enters its element?  Can that even be described in words?  And what about leaving it (actually, I think that's been done)?