Listen to Lucie Brock-Broido reading this poem.
Sorrows, like a gathering of dire wolves, come in packs. To you,
I am not speaking anymore. Whom
Shall I address?
Now that you have gotten these things off
Your barrel chest, it is time for you to merge into the sobbing
Rain, like a one-room scene in Appalachia, smeared
By fog. I adored you as much as an aluminum
Bucket of storm after
A great unlovely silvered thirst. How
Nice for me. In the Pleistocene, the wild wolves roamed
In scattered sorrows over
Everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling
At the hollow of
Everything empty like a throat coated
With the fabric of a bolt
Of red. There
Are things which can dismantle entirely
A spirit, such as the pathetic maledictive fear
Of loss. Of loss:
You get to speak of it, once
You are its intimate, and not before; it would be
"Appropriation." But in the great white rendezvous, where
I was brooding Just a while, you get to speak of dire love.