Full Description
Wolf Centos is comprised of centos, a patchwork form that originated around the 4th century. The form is one which re-configures pre-existing poetic texts into new systems of imagery and ideas. The author is able to place poets in conversation with one another across centuries and across continents. Though the poems are explicitly sutured together by the motif of the wolf, they are also linked by other elements, particularly motifs of language, loss, desire, and transformation. Wolf Centos is ultimately elegiac as it oscillates between transformation and stasis, wildness and domesticity, death and beauty, damage and healing, because ultimately our lives constantly shift between these polarities as well. The ultimate knowledge of the poems is that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our “wildness"—the wolf's wilderness—inside us. In this way, the wolf becomes a symbol of a threshold, a transformative space.
Contents
1.
[I saw my life a wolf loping along the road]
[Sea-blue, shot through]
[I transformed into this thing, this beautiful]
[Outside the new world winters in grand dark]
[Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf at a live heart]
[When tenderness seems tired]
[Who will take the madness from the trees?]
[Stunned by gold, we see coming]
[In the space of a half-open gold door]
[We: spectators, always, everywhere]
[In moon-swallowed shadows]
[Under somber firs two wolves mingled]
[Desire discriminates & language]
[It was a desire rather than a boat]
[There are wolves in the next room]
2.
[I have lost my being in so many beings]
[A stranger's coming past]
[Nothing remains of you. The city]
[From this bleak hotel, & at the bored]
[Like a blue-blooded corona, I knocked]
[All song of the woods is crushed]
[After the first snow has fallen to its squalls]
[No cause you should weep, Wolf]
[Here in this town, in a glass honeycomb]
[Everything in these parts is geared
[How long have I left you?—played the wolf]
[Beyond the baying of a snow wolf]
[Having erased all the past like a false eye]
[Cripple of light opening against my back]
[A year ago we all flushed a little brighter]
[The wolf licks her cheeks with]
[They promised me a silence]
[First frost blackens with a cloven hoof]
3.
[I have looked too long into human eyes]
[I dream you into being—mongering wolf]
[With flowers in their lapels, nine]
[November stands at the door.]
[You hear things. I see them. ]
[I watch my life running away]
[There is a wolf in me, sound]
[Everyone in the room wore white masks]
[All night the wolves danced]
[Shrewd wolf of dark innocence]
[In the yellow chalk of my diminishing bones]
[I want to be strung up and singled out]
[What do we leave, living]
