Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 24, Issue 24 Featured Poet, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

A Different Kind of Motion by Roald Hoffmann

Illustration by Sue Babcock

	 for Katelijne Vanduffel
	
The wolf-child creeps around the clearing
where children build a campfire. She hears
a new sound, laughter, cross talk. Upright
shapes jump blurred across the fire. But
they have dogs that smell her, so she can’t
get near. After they run off, she sniffs
the fruit skins, some colored paper they
left. She raises a paw, then tries to stand,
as she saw the children stand, but her rear
legs remain bent, she falls over and over
and over. She hitches away, in her crab-
like motion, fast as the rabbits she catches
and eats. From the edge of the forest
the wolf-child watches men hoe the fields.
They’ve begun to set traps for her. She
tries again to stand, her front legs
on a tree trunk, leg over leg up the bark,
rearing up so the sun coming through
the leaves hits her muddaubed belly. Her 
back legs hurt, like the day she tried to lope
after the wolves, before she came on hitching.
She falls away from the pain, with a grunt,
not the tinkling water sound of children
in her ears. In time, she learns to hobble
leaning on a stick, and the wolf-child comes
on stage with a different kind of motion.

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Złoczów, then Poland. He came to the US in 1949, and has long been at Cornell University in the USA, active as a theoretical chemist. In chemistry, he has taught generations how to think about molecular orbitals.

Hoffmann is also a writer, carving out his own land between poetry, philosophy, and science. He has published five books of non-fiction, written three produced plays, and six volumes of poetry, including two book length selections of his poems in Spanish and Russian translations.

Tags: Poetry, Roald Hoffmann