The wolf watches and asks me questions:
can I watch you eat,
watch myself absorb into you,
play with the cancer.

She questions everything:
even if I want to live,
die now or die later,
although that is
unanswerable or unquestionable.

That is the statement
life wants, love needs
in its haste to sweep up the ashes.
It wishes to be recognized.

I don’t know, I think,
knowing the wolf can hear me—
life, love, everything, everyone too.  

The answer is somewhere
on the drive to Graceland
as I stop to watch
the wolf suckle its cubs.

Maybe I just want a good death
that makes it hard to grieve
among the ashes of Nagasaki.

Life always wants the tableau,
the memento mori to remember
the repetitions.

Inside the wolf I can hear
my mother, grandmother, ex,
soon my father screaming,
moving, just going down, down, down….
into the silent cry of memory.

The wolf looks comfortable and wordless
as she listens to worlds turned to juice inside.
“It was good to know you,” she said,
as if she had known me my entire life.