The Wolf

I was stumble drunk, bent into the ramshackle dawn,
the sun glazed with its own sick, traipsing along
the cracked flagstones toward an apartment
I’d all but abandoned, its contents
strewn across the tile floors
that somehow always
felt cool to the touch, the air
sharp as a cuspid, the molten light
spilling over the icy belt of earth onto
two eyes—smoldering ingots of pig iron
in which I saw myself as both breath and flesh,
corpuscles and sinew, yes, but also a deep
desire to live gasping between my lips
for the first time in seven months,
when he last was inside me
and said I don’t love
you anymore, as if, only
then, recalling something he’d
seen in yesterday’s paper, something
droll and trivial, where the lede is a swath
of text laughing at your need to be known, your
cheap suit crumpled in a ball at the foot of the bed
where language stops and there is only a cold
dark well that asks of you to toss a coin
and make a wish. And I wished for
what all those as weak as me
wish for. I wished for life.