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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936747795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sarabande Books |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2014 |
| Pages: | 72 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wolf Centos
By Simone Muench
Sarabande Books
Copyright © 2014 Simone MuenchAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936747-79-5
CHAPTER 1
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wolf Centos by Simone Muench. Copyright © 2014 Simone Muench. Excerpted by permission of Sarabande Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of 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]