Chapter 21 Other
Other
the air is wintergrief and rust-sharp.
it tastes of fear – am I far enough away? –
and fear smells like guilt and guilt like blood.
she has married a monster, shackled herself
to a wreck to be ruined on the rocks
of her affection – did I get far enough away?
did she see me-not-me become this?
this is a ruin that smoulders like a torch
held to thatch. its smoke, bitter as a warning,
sings of a grief too close to be escaped.
I cannot go home not while she is there
I will not bring the wolf there
I will not frighten her with this – and home
like hope is fragile, contingent on human hands.
I should never have bound her to me
to the wolf to this ugliest of truths
the wolf-skinned are better served by forests,
exiled to a bed of leaves or snow –
some place here will be safe
I can curl up there and sleep away the hours
and hope to wake in my own skin –
sleep is a way of waiting for an ending,
hunting a way of hastening it, and what
is a small death to a wolf’s hunger?
I am not the wolf
I am caught by it
ensnared by it
tangled in its fur
but I am not it I am human
and humans hunt too and this,
this chase, par force de loup, no huntsmen needed,
is better and faster and bloodier
than any with horns and hounds.
and a wolf alone shares trophies with no one
and a kill alone is witnessed only by the moon
and the blood alone drips like regret to the dark earth
and is lost among the mud.
it’s said (by men) that wolves have no names:
that names devour the silent cooperation of the pack,
the comfort-cruelty-community of a group –
I have a name –
but if a name dies when a whole becomes a fragment
then perhaps that’s a greater grief than abandonment.
perhaps belonging is its own loss.
I have never belonged I have always had a name
even the beast in me knows I am something other than this