WOLF CENTO

I dream you into being—mongering wolf
who stands outside the self, makes
its way through the transparent world
& its motions, its laughter & quarrels,
its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks.
The pages turn. Words often fall between
the rising walls where your shadow
draws to an end.

In some region of vellum & toccatas,
it will be as it is in this life, the same room,
simple rural day, & the cinema of sleep.
Stories one has never read.
More & more I see the human form,
a nothingness which longs to be the sea.
Lives infinitely repeated down to atomic thinness
like footfalls in a strange house. If need
be from nothingness, let today
froth from your mouth.

Sources: Jules Supervielle, Maxine Kumin, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Fitzgerald, Tomas Transtromer, Pierre Reverdy, Sandor Csoori, Alain Delahaye, O.V. de L. Milosz, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Eugene Guillevic, Miklos Radnoti, Boris Pasternak

WOLF CENTO

Cripple of light opening against my back.
The summer like blood clots.
Silences crowd here, inhuman & abandoned—
wide-mouthed red flowers whose sweat reminds us
of approaching war. Unsure between two borders,
on this deep trajectory, my body in a sea-gull
line behind me like smoke, frail
flicker in the wolf-howling to the west,
& secrecy, the human dress.

We still live in another world
& what is empty turns its face to us.
Night in all things: in corners, in men’s eyes–
bees in a dried-out hive. Thus we forget
that only words still stand like tar fires in the woods
with a strange animal smell, phosphorus
peeled from old bones. Country
of anonymous pains, to die means leaving
all these things unsolved—arrow, flower, fire.

Sources: Anne Marie Rooney, Sandor Csoori, Lucian Blaga, Tomas Transtromer, Angel Gonzalez, Paul Engle, Sara de Ibanez, William Blake, Philippe Jaccottet, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Gumilev, Rolf Jacobsen, Gottfried Benn, Oswald de Andrade

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Bathing With Frida by Wesley Rothman