[What do we leave, living]
Source Material
Acknowledgments
The Author
1. The question of the wolves turns & turns
All the poetry has wolves in it, Pam.
—The Doors screenplay
I saw my life a wolf loping along the road—
a glint of bone, visible & then gone,
a landscape altered.
Ideas, hair, fingers
fall & come to naught.
A shirt blows across the field.
A shrug of stars as flowers go out on the sea.
Maybe the whole world is absentminded
or floating. The flower, the weather,
the room empties its mind of me,
the sea-pulse of my utterance.
I have stood for a long time
at the edge of a river, unknown, nameless,
hands groping for the shape of the animal.
Not knowing what all the music had been hiding.
with the echo of a shadow
that sleeps after its voyage,
she sat with wolves & magicians
in a corner of an empty house
& saw someone coming
through the whirling snow
like a reflection from arson,
emitting sparks, shaking
the air as if to remind her
of the animal life.
A word, a whisper says this
in the dark: you are feverishly hot.
Forest stands behind forest.
Under your skins you have
other skins; you have a seventh
sense. Don’t you hear
the sky ping above your eye?
All of us are rain
under rain, noon spin
through bright meridian.
Mind drawn on, drawn out
like a little boat bringing
the flame from the other shore.
I transformed into this thing, this beautiful
black howl: wolves & storms
of white trigonometries
& along my veins sailor’s flutes are singing.
Body caught by knowing,
like an inflamed throat, the immense
perception of knees.
This is the weapon: knowledge
with its hundred corridors,
its dark orange trees.
I stop at the edge of my breath,
as if beside a door,
nobody comes, nobody weeps.
How beautiful: indifference at midnight,
light falling mute over the blue trucks.
& when the time comes to die there will be
only this syllable, this tongue
that can no longer pass beyond its husk.
Outside the new world winters in grand dark
like a young wolf in its blood leaping
to snap the flower-flake as my shadow
falls broken-legged down stony precipices,
snowflakes falling more blue than subways,
than astronomy—the body-clocks are stopped
all over town. Your finger drawing my mouth.
Sans teeth, sans eyes.
When the mouth dies, who misses you?
The kill of the wolf is the meat of the wolf:
he may do what he will.
Inside the wolf’s tongue, the doe’s tears.
It was wet & we licked the hollow
where a hare could hide.
Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf
at a live heart, the sun breaks down.
What is important is to avoid
the time allotted for disavowels
as the livid wound
leaves a trace leaves an abscess
takes its contraction for those clouds
that dip thunder & vanish
like rose leaves in closed jars.
Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
crystal bone into thin air.
The
