The Future is an Animal

In every kind of dream I am a black wolf

careening through a web. I am the spider

who eats the wolf and inhabits the wolf's body.

In another dream I marry the wolf and then

am very lonely. I seek my name and they name me

Lucky Dragon. I would love to tell you that all

of this has a certain ending but the most frightening

stories are the ones with no ending at all.

The path goes on and on. The road keeps forking,

splitting like an endless atom, splitting

like a lip, and the globe is on fire. As many

times as the book is read, the pages continue

to grow, multiply. They said, In the beginning,

and that was the moral of the original and most

important story. The story of man. One story.

I laid my head down and my head was heavy.

Hair sprouted through the skin, hair black

and bending toward night grass. I was becoming

the wolf again, my own teeth breaking

into my mouth for the first time, a kind of beauty

to be swallowed in interior bite and fever.

My mind a miraculous ember until I am the beast.

I run from the story that is faster than me,

the words shatter and pant to outchase me.

The story catches my heels when I turn

to love its hungry face, when I am willing

to be eaten to understand my fate.