LOBO

When it is cold,
when the air cracks like a hundred-year-old tree,
when there is the thinnest nothing,
and the lake is clear and hard as the moon,
I come forth and sniff the air,
my fur around me sleek as thought.
I scent and scent and then
give the moon back to the moon in one long O,
give the ice to the moon and the yawning lake
and the stiff black fur of the trees,
and my O fills the sky
till the others come,
low, loping, yittering and yelling back,
lashing the air with their quick tongues
like a mob coming toward the palace,
like the tongues of a million unmarked graves,
like ten-thousand sirens in a thousand cities,
the gray, the silver, and the white with black foot.
We sit in council,
chasing the moon on its way,
supporting the sky, rounding out its hollow,
and our music is murder over the hills,
cold tongues on your back,
the sharp tooth at your throat,
and slaver glittering over your stiff eyes.
You, lying in the hollow,
you, turning in the cold bed, afraid to drop
down into the black lair of sleep
with its ten-hundred-million pleading mouths
and its insistent hungers,
you, before whom the electric eye flickers in the dark,
shrinks to a pinpoint, and goes out
after dropping at your feet a hundred corpses
from a dozen different countries,
each with a story, each with a vision
at which you can only stare without speaking
as they stalk you on lupine foot.