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Dire Wolf

By Lucie Brock-BroidoPosted Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2003, at 2:07 PM ET

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.

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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.
Click here 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.
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