Simone Muench
Wolf Cento
for Jake Adam York

In the wood-world’s torn despair, where winter

wolves bark amid wastes of snow, & last year’s

leaves are smoke, compose the dark, compose

the last word still tender on the eardrum

as evidence collects beneath the cancelled stars.

Today I have done nothing.

Nor could I recognize you in the haze

with a plain face hiding thousands

of other faces, fasciculated, beautiful.

The black waltz starts. The gods don’t speak.

For a long time there was no sun.

Like a midnight mockingbird

you appear now singing in the foliage,

the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time.

 

[Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Robert Frost, Larry Levis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Yoshioka Minoru, Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Walt Whitman, W. C. Williams, Jake Adam York]