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The assignment was to write a story inspired by a poem by James Dickey. I chose "For the Last Wolverine" I'll include the poem after the story...
“Milos: Inspired by ‘For the Last Wolverine’ by James Dickey”
Milos brought the sledge-hammer down weak upon the iron spike, letting its iron head fall, brittle, with a ping. It still threatened to split with the sound, like heavy glass breaking, its shockwave almost visible—and the sound drowned Milos out of himself and his memory—the ship that carried him over to New York City, where the grass had all died.
He forgot the shit smell of the ship and the powdered salt running up the walls around its hearth fire. The ping brought red, resonated through the iron cross in his back, and he was all the more aware of his mechanics.
Fifty yards to his left were four men hauling track with ice-riddled rope, and further down were those unloading ice-riddled blocks from a horse drawn wagon. On his right the locomotive asserted itself, an immovable behemoth, a solitary tower—and way down the way, through the haze of light snowfall was the steady scrape of the saw.
Yesterday Michael had run screaming into the tundra. He’d stripped down throughout the day, until at last he was shirtless and ghost white. The instant Milos caught sight of his dripping sweat Michael had thrown his hammer, which spun like clock-hands fifty yards through the air and plopped softly in the snow just short of the black wolf that stared at him unflinching. Then Michael ran in the opposite direction, and ran until he was gone. The wolf turned and walked away.
Now Milos wiped his forehead and turned around to see the grizzled, red-eyed beast resting on its haunches at the edge of the forest the men had sliced in half. Milos felt a heat welling up within him and suddenly he was blistering inside. He looked around and his compatriots had gone. Milos then suddenly forgot they were ever there.
The snow vanished into the ether. The iron mechanics melted away. The grass and the wildflowers burst up around him, and Milos became a tree…
Upon him the wolf then scratched his back—until there was no Milos, and the man’s mechanics became so obscene that he burst from himself, a fire eating through his bone and gristle and making him the air—
That the wolf did breathe deep
Before turning and walking
Back into the woods.
Over bread and pork, the railroad crew talked about how far Milos must’ve run before his blood froze in his veins.
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FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE
by James Dickey
They will soon be down
To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned
To extinction, tearing the guts
From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat
The heart, and, from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnawing head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk
Out into the open, in the full
Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying
Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,
As the sky breaks open
Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises
Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk's horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all
My way: at the top of that tree I place
The New World's last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving
Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame
And mingle them, crackling with feathers,
In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary
Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:
That it will hover, made purely of northern
Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: will perch
On the moose's horn like a falcon
Riding into battle into holy war against
Screaming railroad crews: will pull
Whole traplines like fibers from the snow
In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.
But, small, filthy, unwinged,
You will soon be crouching
Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion
Of being the last, but none of how much
Your unnoticed going will mean:
How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage,
The glutton's internal fire the elk's
Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,
The pact of the "blind swallowing
Thing," with himself, to eat
The world, and not to be driven off it
Until it is gone, even if it takes
Forever. I take you as you are
And make of you what I will,
Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty
Non-survivor.
Lord, let me die but not die
Out.
Copyright © 1966 by James Dickey
Online Source - http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/dickey/wolverine.htm
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Siredwinsantos@gmail.com
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