Wolves

By | 1 April 2016

In the last winter on
earth I walk through
the woods giving a
poetry reading.

I give it to wolves gazing out from
behind big clumpy weeds wearing
snow wigs. My own wig was pure
pelf, my poem a cadenced paean to
pelts. Wet pants beneath belt.
When there’s no more winters
where are all these wolves gonna
go? The trees melting into the
forest floor, it’s going to
be that hot, everywhere
in the world. Thank God I hate
skiing and hockey and every other winter activity
except for slipping down a slim path to a hot hot
tub, with you in it.

In my former life
I was a snowflake,
drifting into someone’s coffee to make it
that much shittier
to drink. You can just tell.
Although I’m trying to be sweeter now,

sweet as banana-fried
sundae, swimming in
chocolate lava.

In the life before that one I was a motherfucking
wolf! Six to eight years I medium-raged in a
still pretty chilly wood. When lil
fascists came to suck at my nip I
said nope! I ate plums and drank
plums. I knew what I was, host
to an army of ticks that loved
powdered sugar snow caught in the
clefts
of my fur. A wolf,
I’d tumble around the snow, mouth
all smeared with fruity
mess, giving poetry
readings.

I guess when there’s no more
winter there won’t be any more
falling
into precarious ice and
drowning in the lake. Twelve
months
of lemonade cut with freeze cups,
chewing up chicken wings
ravenous, sweating on the porch,
translating Horace’s beautiful poem
about walking through a field
right where taxes meet vestigial
commons. I mean right where, so close
he can
see it and put it in his poem,
singing a song to himself about how
hot this ass looked, bouncing on top
of his toga. Snapping the cot. Roman
solstice. Gasoline smells coming
off a chariot. Pretty hot. The
poem
only lapses into racist reference twice.
A record for him!

It’s going to be so hot when all
I want to do in this incarnation is
stay cool. Antarctic. Barbecue
on Neptune cool. Eileen Myles cool.
Walk through woods, reading my
poems to the wolves.
They are discerning readers. They love
my new work. I make eye
contact with them through the
reeds. While there are still reeds,
while there are still wolves, I’m
out there walking
in ridiculous
weather, in a
ridiculous get-up
tweeting at the
cubs.

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