- Albert Goldbarth / Fang

1.
They both remember the throat
is silver riverined
in the deep beet-color of blood,
a shockingly lovely expanse
the spent – the loser – wolf displays
below the aimed jaws of the victor wolf:
these two that have been battling
to the death, and yet now that the death
is a gift, an admission, the victor
turns from its completion, neurally-wired
for what the PBS narrator stops just short
of calling pity or mercy. He goes on to flashing
stills of a similar stimulus-sign in the violence
of baboons and other animals – zebras
was it? chimps? It’s the throat of the wolf
they remember, the undeniable
persuasion of its flaunted susceptibility; that,
and how at this moment the three-year-old
came wringing the tears of a three-year-old
into the living room: he had peed,
it turned out, on the bigdeal heirloom rug,
and this announcement of the crime was
at once his protection.

2.
There’s also a five- and also a seven-year-old.
She remembers it this way: every day
a three- and a five- and a seven-year-old, belovéd,
inescapable;
                      they’re nice all right, and funny, and you can watch them rummage inside decision-making as if they were trying on grownups’ clothes, some suit that hangs like an elephant hide about them, but mostly they’re me-me-me and snotdribble, talking really talking to them is like talking into one of those stupid fake cellular car phones people use to look important, and anyway how can you say my children are rapidly driving me with their endless savage opera of whoops like small game to a cliff edge, how can you say this to your children, and yet who else does she talk to outside of her nowhere job in Poop, Nebraska, well her husband of course who she loves, and who’s so even-keeled in dealing with the nicked knee and the borrowed car and remembering that when Nan and Oliver come for dinner Oliver can’t eat shrimp so let’s do some of the fettucini plain just butter and who-really-hit-who-first and even the tax deduction for Christ sake ALL AT THE SAME TIME that she wants to make his penis smile as wide as a piano out of pure appreciation and then immediately hates herself for always having to play at The Appreciative One, not that he ever asks for that, of course not it would be too imperfect, some days she could smash his face in the press of the waffle iron, that’s a good one, tell that to me-me-me for a bedtime story, a three-year-old wouldn’t believe it, surely her friends her thirty-three-year-olds would shrug at her list of narcissistic bitching, there are people being mangled under taxi wheels and raped with cheap green bottles of wine by gang boys, who the hell is she to snivel about this invisible little nibbling-away at her quickmeats, look it’s nothing even Vivian says her closest lady buddy, do you want a one-term membership at the workout club and we’ll go shop for a lycra suit like mine with the matching sweatbands, look it’s nothing.
       But the bite of the wolf is something. The bite of the wolf can’t be denied.
       It’s so simple: she makes of her wrist a throat. “. . . is silver riverined in the deep beet-color of blood.”
       When he returns from the store he’ll find her absentmindedly holding the razor.
       There! (So simple . . .)
       There! NOW do you see?

3.
Love cuts, his daddy told him once.
It’s night, she’s asleep, the bag of fettucini
is still where he dropped it.
                                                 He remembers
it this way: every day, for everyone, needs stitching its imperiled seams together every minute.
       Nan came over, after she’d heard. She was full of pronouncements. “Everybody has problems. Look, I have problems. Oliver’s as crammed with them as an olive loaf. You can’t take one woman’s troubles and make a fetish of them.” And there was more: the term “emotional blackmail” kept appearing. He had to ask her to leave – politely; she meant well.
       The grunge of it doesn’t leave, however. He stares at himself in a polished spoon. He tries so hard. Well, they all try hard: he has to be fair. But some people’s trying, let’s face it, keeps a family a humming working unit. Some people’s trying barely keeps themselves from blowing apart into pointillism. He feels very alone in Pit or Poot or Putt-Putt, Nebraska, as they call it. A smear in a cereal spoon.
       She really wanted to kill him and the kids, he knows, but loved them at the same time, to the same degree, and so she attempted its inverse. “This is a very creepy thought,” he says to the spoon. And should he just beat the bloody shit out of her now, or seem as if he might, would that be cathartic? Should he simply go about the quiet tender ministrations of a worried caring husband? Yes, but wouldn’t that very unruffledness and show of capability be an implicit rebuke to her recent hyperdrama? Mr. Spoon says, “It’s a no-win situation.” Once he hears it from an outside authority – Mr. Spoon is stern and impressive – he gets to say, without feeling guilty, “It isn’t fair.” Or anyway, without feeling terribly guilty.
       He can see a line of civilized reaction (in a way, it’s emblematic of what makes civilization possible) extending from the law of the pack to their own much-mortgaged shingle roof in Puke, Nebraska. Now the entire world has to stop and admire the glint of her razor blade and revolve around it.
       . . . now that the death is a gift, an admission . . . 
       You can’t win against such weakness.

4.
Later that week, I visited.
I heard the story three times: his and hers
and theirs, which really makes three
different stories. The tv show
and the scatter of spinach pasta . . .   all of the details,
all of the pennyweights and bearings that keep
a great unthinkable thing from flying off.
They put the kids to bed, goodnight-goodnight-goodnight.
Then we could lose the public edge of ourselves
in a couple of bourbons – excellent stuff,
the kind with smoky ghosts inside – and talk with our individual
softnesses showing: the talk
of trusting friends. And then they took themselves to bed.
I was sleepless. This is what I remember:
I wanted to gather them all in my arms;
but life doesn’t work like the songs.
I wanted to write a poem that would heal;
but eventually we grow up, we learn about that.
So I just kicked around the guest room,
watching the night refold itself
over Putz or Pap, Nebraska,
a singularly opaque and enigmatic night.
I have to admit: I was useless there,
I was only a small slow bellows of sighs,
like some machine they’d left on, to humidify the room.
I walked out: the night was something enterable,
a black gas, something filming the face.
And then I heard it, and quickly returned inside,
I’d heard it licking its lips, I’d heard it
circling these friends of mine. And it wasn’t only
this house on the plains, this clinical grief – no,
everywhere, I saw now, it was waiting for its chance,
wherever a door was open, any time a voice cracked.
It was born in the bones. It was burnt in the sky.
And the moon up there was an old old moon,
so slim and sharp, the oldest moon
that ever stabbed us
– the tooth of a wolf.