Wolf Centos

Sarabande Books

Contents

The question of the wolves turns & turns

All the poetry has wolves in it, Pam.

—The Doors screenplay

    Wolf Cento

    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.


    Wolf Cento

    Sea-blue, shot through
    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.


    Wolf Cento

    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.


    Wolf Cento

    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.


    Wolf Cento

    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 small hours open their wounds for me.
    This is a woman's confession:
    I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.


    Wolf Cento

    When tenderness seems tired,
    the girl nestles down in me
    with her she-wolf's mask,
    places a word in the hollow
    of my mute being.
    Impossible to be alone
    in language, light of bird-laden
    lemon trees.
    We're between blue & good evening,
    heaving with brilliants: the mortal
    glitter of the naked beach,
    the glass horizon.
    (It is the human that is alien.)
    Even with her severed tongue
    the she-wolf bathes herself
    in the blue vertigo in my mouth
    where the planets flicker.
    The orange tree breaks into foam
    & no god comes.


    Wolf Cento

    Who will take the madness from the trees?
    The petals of dead planets broken.
    What do they matter now, the deprivations.

    Your voice will never recover
    what was said once, so when you hold
    the hemisphere & once more take up the world,

    I can see myself in you as though I were sitting
    in a beautiful wound. I drink from your footprint
    & see: a red wolf strangled by an angel

    against the immeasurable sun. This terrifying
    world is not devoid of charms—
    the poppy that no girl's finger has opened,

    farmhouses dark against a sublime blue,
    an airplane whistling from the other world.
    In the distance someone is singing. In the distance

    a slow, sweet song crowded with floating animals
    & small artifacts: bell jar, honeycomb, revolver.
    Can we describe the world this way—

    with stars & bullet holes? A presence or its contrary?
    Like dizzy horses that dissolve into a dust of sheen,
    I pass through them as they pass through me.


    Wolf Cento

    Stunned by gold, we see coming
    in full gallop, at vertiginous speed, the last sun,
    frail orbits, green tries, games of stars.
    We are looking for a way to live
    as the she-wolf of these clouds tumbles
    down through stricken dawn-dark, slanting
    through the quadrant seasons, deep
    between vineyard rows. With her teeth
    the she-wolf reaches the blonde braid of a star,
    a thing of gleaming: a radiant evanescence
    the blue dogs paw. Lick the dew
    opening beautifully inside my brain
    where everything is green like quetzal flowers
    or the light in the skull of a bird
    or a thousand tropics in an apple blossom—
    What's there: the endless clear country road,
    a cold drink before sunset & then a bed.
    We are looking for a way to live.


    Wolf Cento

    In the space of a half-open gold door
    your body's animals want to get out
    running among these rigid hills
    weather-swept with rose or lichen,
    a red noise of bones.

    The heart passing through a tunnel
    is a mute creature from whose sleepless
    hands the sun has fallen
    into a million swallows.
    Our broken bodies are unleashed.
    Far from his illness, the wolves run on.


    Wolf Cento

    We: spectators, always, everywhere
    with goldpinnacled hair & seascapes
    of a pale green monochrome,
    we wanted to be wolves:
    strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness—
    a step toward luck & a step toward ruin.

    Old circuits of animal rapture & alarm
    have stained the sun with blackened love.

    The question of the wolves turns & turns.

Desire discriminates & language discriminates

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

—T.S. Eliot

    Wolf Cento

    Desire discriminates & language
    discriminates. Let me lick
    your closed eyes: where the landscape
    begins in smoke; the blue petals
    become a single text,
    a wolf in a wilderness of snow.

    Open my ears & let your frenzy enter
    relentlessly, like a blind machine,
    like a sea captain who doesn't trust the stars,
    carried off by an unsteady boat.
    My life, this shirt I want to take off—
    what can't be said is the dark meat,
    seeking your mouth in another's mouth,
    the whispered cries of animals without sleep.


    Wolf Cento

    It was a desire rather than a boat
    ruffling the gasoline moons in the harbor
    as it climbed over centuries & bones
    & held the breath of the naked.
    With wolftrap eyes, your flesh
    remembers our secret
    kept so well & so badly.
    To damage is an animal hunch
    & urge at the approach of a mouth
    murmuring a hidden name. What beast
    of saliva & suet has moistened my bones?
    A flame, an inverted tear circling our bodies
    always in the open field—acidic music
    of thistles. Don't burn if I kiss someone else.
    Eros is a wolf, Caesar.
    Through the thickets your paws break.


    Wolf Cento

    In moon-swallowed shadows
    amid the tiger-purring greenery
    I take a wolf's rib & whittle it
    into little months, little smokes
    & oblivion. Beautiful,
    those boys among the roses
    where fiery blossoms clot the light
    & we licked the blood off our paws.
    How many have died
    in sweeter morgues?
    It was all like a childhood picture:
    our windows ravenous
    as snow wolves & again
    a rose-petal falls in an empty bed.


    Wolf Cento

    Under somber firs two wolves mingled
    their blood, fell into the dense growth,
    rustling the submarine foliage of language.

    The syllables unearthed, traveling
    through flesh into green waves
    & all that we touch phosphoresces:

    a cloud seeded with a green sun,
    transforms into part of your anatomy,
    out of reach of all mythology.

    I feel an itchiness begin slowly.
    The emptiness that swells
    by being empty, like desire

    in the upper leaves; the silence
    of a postponed sentence.
    Beyond my anxiety, beyond

    my mouth & its words,
    the peach glows reddish among leaves
    under the sun's semaphore

    & dark deciphering of bird flight,
    its acid, secret symmetry.
    A wasp sonata slips through the house.

    There's a kind of restlessness
    like a hissing that runs under my skin,
    a star in its syllable socket.

    I want to tremble, to shudder,
    to split apart, to go on.
    I cut the last leaf. You were gone.


    Wolf Cento

    There are wolves in the next room
    waiting when I turn towards you
    snake-spined, all Pentecostal shivers
    beneath the sun's cooled carbon wing
    as we wait for something which is not the rain.
    Step by step you leave yourself—
    the ship of a clear October's end.
    Our lives are language, our desire apophatic:
    The stars slowly clicking themselves apart
    like bees that forget the topography of their hives.
    Now that all your distance surrounds me,
    your mouth is the blue door I walk through.
    Its bright impossibility pours into me & vanishes
    in those stars whose light speaks a language.
    The beautiful boys will run in that light
    where honey tightens in a coherence of rays
    where my sleepwalker's movements slide
    like rain running under the peach tree,
    sweet vowels of shadow & water.
    The world has only one voice.
    It's not you I've lost.


    Wolf Cento

    I have lost my being in so many beings:
    travelers passing by night, the great wolf
    who goes wounded & bleeding through the snows.

    Someone has closed the door, someone
    heavy with the rain of all eyes. His muzzle
    has rummaged my shoulders.

    Thorns illuminate. Owls swell
    the shadows. The last poppy, the last
    galaxy of the red dress illuminates

    & scatters the opaque weight of the flesh.
    That strange beneficent geography
    where fingers probe the desert

    of two lips, a wound where soured sugar flows,
    where the landscape begins its adulthood of dust.
    All is near & can't be touched.


    Wolf Cento

    How long have I left you?—played the wolf
    or the witch. There I was without a face,

    where the river freezing & fabled condenses
    to a point, stalled in forgetfulness & salt.

    In my ear, the tongue of a stranger.
    That's the way it goes in the dark. One card,

    one turn: two dogs bark at the moon,
    kept awake by the same laws.

    We saw the wounds of our country
    appear on our skins. An entire

    butcher's woods hemmed your bare neck
    with a red band of mist, an orange wash

    in which every edge frays—
    all else is the shade of alien wildwood.

    There's a soft spot in everything,
    a hollow place where no one goes;

    a door I've closed until the end of the world.
    Let the wind come, let my house burn.

    I'll spread my thin arms to hide the fire.
    Regardless of how perishable we are, here,

    I dwell in your ear: the hull of a dream,
    black against the coastline's pink.


    Wolf Cento

    Beyond the baying of a snow wolf,
    a black question mark crops up in the sky.

    Between its filaments, door of igneous glimmer
    & this triggered echo: who is anointed?
    If the afternoon had been blue,
    there might have been less desire.

    We are elaborate beasts.
    We are poor passing facts

    lined with gleaming coral necklaces
    that set teeth on edge. Taste

    of spoiled elegies, a southern damp,
    as though someone had stuffed

    the rippling mouths of women
    with fig trees, foliate fire

    rooted to budding metal
    under the dark green weeds

    like a bundle of keys gleaming:
    a distant door heard closing.


    Wolf Cento

    Here in this town, in a glass honeycomb,
    darkness restores what light cannot repair.
    Door number three: a narrow hotel room.
    The unknown guest is calling. The ceiling,
    the receiver will snow. I will lock myself
    into this snowing, not hear a shadow
    shoed in fur, though the wolves call
    with their backbones of fire.

    I listen to the words, which are whispered:
    better to live in the dark. A gentle animal
    appears & slowly shuts our eyelids.
    Twelve knocks resound. Then, at last,
    all disappears. Nameless in the endless
    corridor: the strangers we grow into.


    Wolf Cento

    Nothing remains of you. The city
    rotates in the canal's fluorescence
    caught between the rains of obese trees
    dripping a thousand sugars
    & whorls of more carnal flowers.
    I go out to the road & I listen to this
    fouled landscape that's sunk into itself.
    Wolves yawn in front of the open cage.
    Nothing glistens under the arcades.
    In the parks, electric light breaks
    through the branches, a man
    waves from his spandex biking outfit.
    Everything else is hushed
    like a much-hunted animal
    fixing us in her eyeshine.
    We live in a world of motion & distance.
    No matter where we go, we always arrive
    too late & whatever houses we return to
    in this stuffed masquerade,
    we are at a party that doesn't love us.