Meditative Weekend of Poetry: M.K. Foster
—the one that robs your barn, stalks your home, sniffs your door,
the one too fast for a gun, too big for trap, the one that marks
your stables, watches the yellow of your kitchen window at dusk,
wolf that waits for you like sleep, then follows you into sleep,
flooding your moon, breathing slowly, fogging your skin like
glass, the wolf in your furnace, in your flock, in your chimney,
in your well, the one that lies down with you at night, fucks,
and fucks you beautiful, you’re beautiful when you howl, startling
birds and bruising your lungs amethyst, wolf like the slender
smoke of a dropped match, like the morning smell of blackened
firebrick, wolf like all your forks clean, suddenly back in
their drawer, all those careful metal teeth in all those careful
metal rows, it’s the wolf that watches you walk to your car,
knows where the parking deck is, knows the unlit stairwells,
remembers the street corners where there are no cameras, wolf
that snapped its jaws at you in an elevator once when the lift
jammed, the lights flashed, and you looked up at the mirrored
ceiling for an answer, then couldn’t look away from the body that
stared back, what are you that I am, wolf that’s eaten every song-
bird in your chest and preyed away the larger animals, first to
know when to evacuate and last to leave when the damn finally
breaks: —dip your knife into lamb blood, and freeze it. Dip the
knife in, freeze it, again. Repeat until you have a bloody icicle,
then fix it to a stake and drive it point-up in the yard: this wolf
will have no choice but to eat until killed. You’ll be dying
for more before you can stop yourself, expert hunters say,
you’ll mistake your blood on your face for another’s, that blade
burning at the core, mouth-flesh flaming, swelling metallic,
for a heart: meat red, so throb-raw for once, you’ll wish it could
beat as you feed, hammer you to ashes, crush you like rust.
(”Poem For How To Kill The Wolf”, The Adroit Journal #27)
(Suggestions: I love reading this poem because M.K. Foster provides a visible ribbon of an image’s evolution. The wolf viscerally winds in and out of words within the poem and, in doing so, is slowly disintegrated. By the end of the work, the wolf has disappeared and there is only talk of its absence, of the consequences or fallout from the wolf’s sudden dispensation.
Try this: this exercise may require you to print out write the poem out. Do it so that you have a margin to the right or left or both. First, chart the wolf’s progress through the poem (perhaps even writing the poem out horizontally on a large piece of paper would work...). Draw a picture of the wolf at the beginning of the poem as you see its current incarnation. As you proceed through the verse note where the wolf’s constitution is changed within the verse and draw a picture of that (the picture doesn’t have to be “good”, it’s for your own reference.). What pictures did you draw? Find one word or short phrase to describe it and write these phrases down one behind the other. What have you found?)
