Calling a Wolf a Wolf

by Kaveh Akbar

Upon landing, the ground embraced me sadly, with the gentleness of someone delivering tragic news to a child.

It can be difficult telling the size of something when it’s right above you—the average cumulus cloud weighing as much as eighty elephants. The things I’ve thought I’ve loved could sink an ocean liner, and likely would if given the chance.

am less horrible than I could be I’ve never set a house on fire never thrown a firstborn off a bridge still my whole life I answered every cry for help with a pour with a turning away I’ve given this coldness many names thinking if it had a name it would have a solution thinking if I called a wolf a wolf I might dull its fangs I carried the coldness like a diamond for years holding it close near as blood until one day I woke and it was fully inside me

the bright flurry of finches outside dull I worry sometimes there is no true wildness

You just don’t know yet which parts of yourself to value— your spittle or its syrupy smell, your irises or their mothish obsession with light. Even the trap-caught fox knew enough to chew away its leg, delighting (if such a thing can be said) at the relative softness of marrow. Nature rewards this kind of courage— a kingfisher shoots into a pond and comes out with a stickleback. Starving mice will often eat their own tails before ceding to hunger. The lesson: it’s never too late to become a new thing, to rip the fur from your face and dive dimplefirst into the strange.

Take it all out on me. Or, take it up with my maker, who is right now stiff with guilt sitting in heaven, chain- chewing whitening gum. In the first language, the word for bridge translates to death by water. The iron law of congestion: traffic expands to flood any available space. Keep a soul open and it’s bound to fill up with scum. It’s all I can do to quiver in and out of my jeans each day, to keep my fingers out of the wrong mouths. A man creates the most joy in the abstract, when you can remove his actual body, its shear carapace and bleeding gums. Cut it away, the entire boring envelope, and marvel at what remains: a pulsing vacuum bag stuffed with rubies and bone spurs, a pink lighthouse only barely heavier than its light.

“The evidence of a successful miracle is the return of hunger.” —FANNY HOWE

I’ve made it clear I am not to be trusted with a body always leaving mine bloodless as ice with just a needle of breath left in its lungs sometimes when I run I run like a beautiful man in straight lines clean as spidersilk sometimes if I’m silent for long enough even the wild around me stops moving

Do I have to talk about fear? So much has already been said about hidden spiders, compass needles lodged in the soft of an eye. The soul is a thirsty antelope nervously lapping up water from a pool in the hunter’s backyard.

Droughts occur constantly under God’s holy watch. His response? He yawns immortally on his throne, fans himself with an elephant ear.

There is no new world.

I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent, holding a rat underwater or twining shut the jaw of a lamb before it’s roasted on the spit. It’s only natural to smell smoke and feel hungry, to lean into the confusion of tongues. If I am to be punished for any of this, it will be thousands of years too late.

I am glad I still exist glad for cats and moss and Turkish indigo and yet to be light upon the earth to be steel bent around an endless black to once again be God’s own tuning fork and yet and yet

it’s hard to remember your ribs connect to your backbone until the chill in your chest reaches around for your spine

With each second passing over me may that heaven grow and grow.

All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them, but secretly I will want that very much.

GOD I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain. On this one the wet is driving people mad—the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. There is a flat logic to neglect. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will ...

I try not to think of God as a debt to luck but for years I consumed nothing that did not harm me and still I lived, witless as a bird flying over state lines. I would be more grateful if being alive hadn’t seemed so effortless, the way I’d appreciate gravity more if I’d had trouble floating in my teens.

See how my throat is filling with salt? Boil me. Divide me. Wrap me in paper and return me to earth. One day I will crack open underneath the field mushrooms. One day I will wake up in someone else’s bones.

not long ago I was hard to even hug like ribbons of cartilage cut from a lamb I dressed in shredded roses and pistachio shells I drank an entire language and flung tar at whatever moved until the world cut me open like a tube of paint until it crushed me between its fingers like a hornet none of it was graceful I had to learn to love people one at a time singing hey diddle diddle will you suffer me a little how could they say no how could they say anything I kept biting their tongues I kept clicking my heels now I am cheery and Germanic like a drawer full of strudel I always wanted to be a saint but I thought I’d be one of the miserable ones sainted by pain burnt alive inside a brazen bull instead I weep openly at obnoxious beauty cello music comes in from blocks away and I lose it completely there is a word for these fits of incomprehensible delight I said it last night when my mouth was full of cake

hold my breath. The boat I am building will never be done.