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Beneath the wreckage of an old float I can see Ives,

watching me now with his tilting skeptic head.

 

He knows something is up, which is more than I can say for Mozart,

Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven, who came at first call.

 

Their trust of me, built carefully over time with a steady

supply of easy nourishment, will be the end of them.

 

They should know by now nothing good is easy here.

 

Though their bodies – at least the two of them - are no longer prototypically lean like wolfpups, they still think like wolfpups.

 

Only Ives is shapely, with a brutish mass that tells me

he’s been finding meat on his own, sneaking

outside the gates to venture solo at night.

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I have chosen the courtyard outside Manic Mangoose’s Monstery Manor because it feels somehow fitting, funereal with its picturesque fountains, Styrofoam tombstones, and shrubbery once so immaculately pruned every morning.

 

Now, it conveys a wildness that is both ordinary and sacred.

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            I keep thinking: were I a wolf no longer wild, would I mind dying here?

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It is Beethoven who has presented himself

openly to me, boldly even, while Mozart and

Tchaikovsky stare on, wondering why I’ve

summoned them all here.

 

So it is Beethoven I’ll do first;

the other two will be easy enough to catch later on,

if they even have the good sense to flee.

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