Incident on the Road to the Capital
A wolf had grown tired of his character and sought to find a means to transform himself into something more vicious, more deadly. While his coat was slick, thick and well-colored, for he was an excellent hunter, he yearned for something to do that had nothing to do with survival or instinct. He no longer killed because he needed to or could. All that was useless, too practical, too obvious. He wanted to kill for some other purpose. For all of his successfully completed kills, his perfect record of stealth and elusion, he felt nothing. When he ran into me the other day on his journey to consult the oracle of escalated suffering we shared a table in the shade of a parasol tree in whose branches were preening half a dozen or so birds with gaudy chromatic feathers. A few of these fell onto the dome of his forehead but he was too engrossed in his story to brush them away. He didn't look like a very serious wolf. I think he was missing a real opportunity.
Credit
From Selected Poems by Dara Wier. Copyright © 2010 by Dara Wier. Used by permission of Wave Books.
Date Published
01/01/2010