Dire Wolf
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
Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of A Hunger and The Master Letters. Her third book, Trouble in Mind, will be out later this year. She lives in Cambridge, Mass., and in New York City, where she is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
Clickhere to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.To submit poetry to Slate, send up to five poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215.