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Carlo Matos

The Wolf Declassified

1.

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I saw my life a wolf loping along the road—
a glint of bone, visible & then gone,
a landscape altered.
Ideas, hair, fingers
fall & come to naught.
A shirt blows across the field.
A shrug of stars as flowers go out on the sea.
Maybe the whole world is absentminded
or floating. The flower, the weather,
the room empties its mind of me,
the sea-pulse of my utterance.
I have stood for a long time
at the edge of a river, unknown, nameless,
hands groping for the shape of the animal.
Not knowing what all the music had been hiding.


*Simone Muench's original cento appeared in A Public Space


2.

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Sea-blue, shot through
with the echo of a shadow
that sleeps after its voyage,

she sat with wolves & magicians
in a corner of an empty house
& saw someone coming

through the whirling snow
like a reflection from arson,
emitting sparks, shaking

the air as if to remind her
of the animal life.
A word, a whisper says this

in the dark: you are feverishly hot.
Forest stands behind forest.
Under your skins you have

other skins; you have a seventh
sense. Don't you hear
the sky ping above your eye?

All of us are rain
under rain, noon spin
through bright meridian.

Mind drawn on, drawn out
like a little boat bringing
the flame from the other shore.


*Simone Muench's original cento appeared in Parthenon West Review


3.

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I transformed into this thing, this beautiful
black howl: wolves & storms
of white trigonometries
& along my veins sailor's flutes are singing.
Body caught by knowing,
like an inflamed throat, the immense
perception of knees.
This is the weapon: knowledge
with its hundred corridors,
its dark orange trees.
I stop at the edge of my breath,
as if beside a door,
nobody comes, nobody weeps.
How beautiful: indifference at midnight,
light falling mute over the blue trucks.
& when the time comes to die there will be
only this syllable, this tongue
that can no longer pass beyond its husk.


*Simone Muench's original cento appeared in Boston Review


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