Wolf
~William Trowbridge

 

 

Ink black, shark toothed, slithering

serpentine off the cover of my album

Peter and the Wolf, he paced beneath

 

the stairs in our dark basement when

I’d slip down after dinner to marvel

at the old cathedral radio, with its glowing

 

green eye, and study Dad’s forbidden

stash of 40’s girlie mags, the only

light switch a string from a bare bulb

 

in the center of the room, which I’d

have to reach before the wolf clamped on.

In the story, he swallowed the poor

 

jabbering duck alive. You could see her

on the album cover, contrite and silent

in his belly. The radio picked up music

 

clear from Rio, rumbas and sambas

fading in and out as the TV muttered on

upstairs — the green light’s gaze,

 

like an all-seeing eye’s, the wolf’s

greedy breathing, and me

thumbing pages in the light’s asylum

 

as boldface invitations from the spreads

in Whisper, Show, and Eyeful

raised the fuzzy wolf hairs on my neck.

 

 

William Trowbridge’s most recent book of poetry is Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in more than 30 anthologies and textbooks, as well as in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, Columbia, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and New Letters. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship. He is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, where he was an editor of The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press from 1986 to 2004. Now living in Lee’s Summit, MO, he teaches in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in writing program.