Calling a Wolf a Wolf

by Kaveh Akbar

Is there a vocabulary for this—one to make dailiness amplify and not diminish wonder?

I hoarded an entire decade of bliss of brilliant dime-sized raptures and this is what I have to show for it a catastrophe of joints

Listen to me, faithful silence: somehow we’ve become strangers.

envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun for the sinner

Every day my body follows me around asking for things. I try to think louder, try to be brilliant, wildly brilliant.

the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven

I’m becoming more a vessel of memories than a person

God loves the hungry more than the full.

it’s so much easier to catalog hunger to atomize absence and carry each bit like ants taking home a meal

I am not a slow learner I am a quick forgetter such erasing makes one voracious if you teach me something beautiful I will name it quickly before it floats away

I knew only that I wanted to be like him, that twilit stripe of father mesmerizing as the bluewhite Iznik tile hanging in our kitchen, worshipped as the long faultless tongue of God.

I swear, I could conjure rain clouds from piles of ash, guzzle down whole human bodies, the faces like goblets I’d drain then put back in the cupboard.

Performed pain is still pain.

Odd, for an apocalypse to announce itself with such bounty.

even a lobster climbs away from its shell a few times a life but every time I open my eyes I find I am still inside myself each epiphany dull and familiar

I wish you were here so I could bend a mirror around your face, pour you back into you.

it is not God but the flower behind God I treasure

I spent so long in a lover’s quarrel with my flesh the peace seems overcautious too-polite I say

The charm of this particular dilemma: faith begins where knowing ends. The undertaker spills his midday latte on a corpse, a chariot wheel flies off and kills a slave, and nobody asks for a refund. The unexpected happens, then what? The next thing.

the prophets are alive but unrecognizable to us as calligraphy to a mouse

one way to live a life is to spend each moment asking forgiveness for the last

sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body

Thought, penetrate my cloud of unknowing.

The spirit lives in between the parts of a name.

The real world doesn’t care about our spiritual conditions, just asks that we be well enough to smile at its clamor.

I am still learning the local law: don’t hurt something that can smile, don’t hold any grief except your own.