Muench - Wolf centos

2014 by Simone Muench FIRST EDITION All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to: Managing Editor Sarabande Books, Inc. 2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200 Louisville, KY 40205 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Muench, Simone, 1969 [Poems. Selections] Wolf centos / Simone Muench. pages cm Summary: Centos are a patchwork form that originated around 300 AD; WOLF CENTOS places poets in conversation with one another across centuries and continents.

In this volume Muench sutures her poems together with the motifs of the wolf, language, loss, desire, and transformation. The ultimate knowledge of these poems is that as we age and experience loss, we must retain our wildness inside of us Provided by publisher. I. Title. PS3563.U358W68 2014 811'.54dc23 2013048734 Cover art based on the piece Caminos de los Perros, by Kim Ambriz. eBook ISBN: 978-1-936747-88-7 Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

	This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
	The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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. 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. Dont 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. black howl: wolves & storms of white trigonometries & along my veins sailors 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. & when the time comes to die there will be only this syllable, this tongue that can no longer pass beyond its husk. 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 astronomythe body-clocks are stopped all over town. 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 astronomythe 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 wolfs tongue, the does tears. It was wet & we licked the hollow where a hare could hide. 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 womans confession: I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me. the girl nestles down in me with her she-wolfs mask, places a word in the hollow of my mute being.

Impossible to be alone in language, light of bird-laden lemon trees. Were 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. 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 girls 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. in full gallop, at vertiginous speed, the last sun, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars. 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 Whats there: the endless clear country road, a cold drink before sunset & then a bed. We are looking for a way to live. your bodys 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. 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. T.S. T.S.

Eliot 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 doesnt trust the stars, carried off by an unsteady boat. My life, this shirt I want to take off what cant be said is the dark meat, seeking your mouth in anothers mouth, the whispered cries of animals without sleep. 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 fieldacidic music of thistles. Dont burn if I kiss someone else. Eros is a wolf, Caesar. Through the thickets your paws break. amid the tiger-purring greenery I take a wolfs rib & whittle it into little months, little smokes & oblivion.