Wolves, Higher & Lower

“Here's a house to put wolves out the door”
- REM, Wolves, Lower

Sometimes it’s impossibly hard to know

if we should be looking upwards or down

at an acrobatic act for the ages.



These interlocking partners demonstrate 

delicate engineering and balances

honed by years of river flows, rain and trust.

A whole performance, we tell ourselves,

they learned from us, passed on through the howling

of ancestors that cast aside our heated tents.


They’d watched the apes get to grips with two legs

and left to adopt what made useful sense

from their early attempts at showing off.




We catch up with these performers mid-flight,
and will them a safe landing as one peace

of a whole under the fast-moving sky.