Wolf Centos. Simone Muench

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.

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.

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 small hours open their wounds for me.

      This is a woman’s confession:

      I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

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.

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