What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets highlight poetry’s integral role in sustaining our ecological imagination. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay
David Keplinger

“Dogor [is] an 18,000-year-old pup unearthed in
Siberian permafrost whose name means ‘friend’ in
the Yakut language.”
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 3, 2019
You'd grown three weeks into your mouthful
of teeth, before your eyes froze shut and then

your throat, but now you are thawing, moping
again, pretending to be tongue and wet fur and

padded feet. My darling whose day has come.
From out of your mother you fell into ice, at play,

in a pocket of snow, pure love that dug deep,
as the mama and the others dissolved quickly

and the father who'd gone to the important place
did not return. It took one night for the world

to harden you into a long bewildered thought
but eighteen thousand years before the ice

like a pipe, like a vein, burst open—until I say
your full name: Dogor, small bulb that keeps

growing new wolf bodies. Dogor, don't harden 
your eyes and return to the dead. Dogor, don't

freeze again. Don't fight me or take flight into 
a thousand motes of ice. Dogor. Don't bite.

Remember what you are. Leap into my face. Doze
in the crook of my big-boned shoulder. Stay Dogor.
from the book ICE / Milkweed Editions
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Cover image of David Keplinger's book, Ice
What Sparks Poetry:
David Keplinger on "The Ice Age Wolf That Love Is"

"Dogor was discovered in 2019 beneath receding permafrost in this coldest region of Russia. The delight I felt (beholding his small face, seemingly glistening wet nose, whiskers, closed puppy-eyes, tufts of hair and preserved tongue) was tempered by a certain grief, the recognition that it was climate change that had made this vision of our deep past possible."
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An informal, black-and-white photograph of a laughing Lyn Hejinian
In Memoriam: Lyn Hejinian

"I am foundering here, trying to grasp the times we first met, which keep slipping away, as Lyn now does. So much came after: her foundational essays, her decades of teaching, her generative and generous publishing and editing, her exchanges with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and, above all, the dozens of dazzling poetry books, each distinct, the ensemble creating among the most magnificent and delight-filled bodies of work in postwar American poetry."

via THE PARIS REVIEW
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