The first two words of Dave Bonta's "Wrong-Gone Wolf" carry a pun. "Wrong-gone" sounds like "long gone", the phrase we use for something extinct or vanished, but it also suggests a creature that has gone wrong, led astray from what she was. The poem is about a wild animal who survives in a world that has rewritten her, and its central idea is that wildness can be taken away without anyone killing the animal. Her voice, her purpose and even the meaning of her habitat are quietly replaced.
Look at what the wolf is given at the start: "a flag that won't stop waving". Most likely this is her tail, but a flag is also a signal of surrender or of ownership. Either way, the wolf keeps sending a message whatever is happening around her, even when "the forest has / been flattened & abstracted / into a panel of sea-green glass". The verbs are blunt. "Flattened" suggests a machine or a map, and "abstracted" turns living woodland into an idea. The glass might be a window, a screen or a display case. The poem doesn't say, and that vagueness helps, because the point is that the forest has become something to look at rather than live in.
The traps are the strangest image. They "gape like tooth- / less ancestors", and the ancestors are remembered for "raising / wayward human children, / pulling the moon from the sky". Judging by the imagery, this alludes to old stories of wolves who nurse human foundlings, along with the folklore that links wolves to the moon. Calling these deeds a "reputation" makes them sound like inherited publicity, and "that kind of thing" shrugs the whole mythology off in a casual voice. The wolf's past has become a legend, and the real danger, the trap, is now toothless in comparison. Bonta never explains it, and the comedy and unease sit side by side.
The middle of the poem is almost tender. This wolf "can lie / down & sleep beside a fire", an act that would once have been unthinkable and now suggests domestication. "Rabbits graze unperturbed / in the margins of her dreams." The word "margins" makes the rabbits feel like notes on a page, and it shows the wolf has been pushed out of her own dreams as well as her landscape. The hunt has become a footnote. When she goes there "to hunt for / the howl in her throat", she finds "nothing but clipped / syllables of command". The sound is the key to the line. "Clipped" is itself short and tight, and the human language that has replaced her howl is made of orders. Her voice has been trained out of her.
The ending adds a final irony. "Released / once more into her native habitat" sounds like a conservation notice, but the word "native" is shaken by everything before it. The habitat has been flattened, and the wolf may no longer know how to live in it. She "laps rainwater from / the parallel tracks of a creature / whose feet never lose contact / with its enemy, the earth." The tracks read as railway lines, so the creature is a train, and its wheels become "feet" that never leave the ground. Calling the earth its "enemy" is odd, because the wolf's life depends on the earth while the machine only moves over it. The wolf drinks from the machine's path, which is both an act of survival and a sign of defeat. The same rain that once fell on forest now collects on steel.
Formally, the poem is a single block of twenty-four lines of free verse, with no rhyme and no stanza breaks to rest in. Line breaks cut through words ("tooth- / less") and sentences stop in mid-line ("command. Released"), so the reader is constantly pushed forward without a pause, much as the wolf is. The ampersands feel quick and informal, which fits the offhand tone. Bonta uses sound lightly but precisely: the soft w's of "wrong-gone wolf" and "waving" at the start, the hard stops of "traps gape" and "clipped" later.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never says the wolf is a victim, or even that the loss is sad. It gives us images, such as glass, a fire, a rabbit and a rail, and lets us see that a wolf without a howl is no longer quite a wolf. The poem is an elegy that never raises its voice, which is exactly what the wolf can no longer do.