Poem - January

Growing Fur

When all of the little raindrop moments shed

From my human skin like starlike shimmering–

It seems that it’s always night when you and I meet–

I turned thirty.

Already I was seeing the future again,

Between your lips, reluctant sometimes,

Other times parted on me by your devouring teeth. 

I saw the fuzzy shapes of animal love.

On those winter mornings, fog thick enough to obscure the houses 

but not the tops of trees, we came close enough

To see the outlines of each other.

Two hunters fine. 

In pushing forward, there is pulling away,

In aching, the boundless freedom of not yet having tasted,

And in so tasting, to forever ache again to drink for the first time. 

I recognize the same displacedness there in your wolf heart.

That January-6-o’clock-morning, 

Suburbia foetid with dew-sopped overgrowth,

Body pained with the pressure of after-drinking expectations, 

Curling up our paws in the dirt to lose the taste.

And so we sat staring, breath huffing into the mist, 

You and I made music with how we spoke ourselves to being,

And in so speaking we came to blows 

In that steady way that all sounds hide the Mother Beat.

Until between us grew some bright and shining vision, 

Our wondrous gaze falling into the void below things

And between things, and within things, 

Until the fog was golden and every tree top blazed. 

Looking to the sunlight I saw hidden worlds, 

Revealed in their unused-to-it way, 

And my own speaking grows clearer, clearer still 

Clear enough to hear the growl.