There Are No Wolves Inside You, Sport

“I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.” — David Ignatow

In some parallel existence
perhaps you were a wolf
but not a wolf
made by humans.

Inside you
there was just one wolf, and
it was always edging toward hunger.
It was the one you fed. It
was you. Inside that one? Not ours
to say.

That wolf was you
but you were not, you were full
wolf and sufficient without
interpretation.

Or perhaps
you were a hawk in another existence,
or a mountain; not human, you dealt
with life on the terms of hawk or
mountain, conscious in ways
not-human, stubbornly unaware of
metaphor.

The curse of being human
is that we claim we are filled
with starving wolves and aspirational
mountains pushing ever upward,
hawks with keen vision seeking
clarity.

We make everything fit into us,
insist everything else is
one of us and now, now?
See where we are —

knowing nothing of the world, staring at
posters hanging outside the cubicle,
working so hard, wishing we were
those fake wolves,
trying not to scream.