Only Out of Love
for Akira
I taste a strangers blood young
but its only out of love.
No-Fang, nose-mute and night wandering,
who else to guard your throat
but me?
They take me from the field
and a proud woman I have forgotten
but knew as my mother.
Chains and grass and my mother’s teeth
no longer in my scruff,
but hands, clawless and soft
as if made, not to beat against the dirt,
but to smooth my coat to cloud
Now in their block world, soft world,
a two-tone boy bites my ear
and claws the black of my eye blue.
The world is scar-fogged but I can feel
many new hands through my fur,
warm like they caught
the meadow sun in their skin.
Stray, they say.
And then a name
and more names
for everything
I didn’t need to know before.
Because they need
so many things from me.
But there are ropes and bones and rubber,
hard crunch plentiful and everything
teeth could want.
They take me to places I know, too:
river and mountain and snowy glade,
where I teach you
what pack means.
A fang to shield,
a bark to caution.
A wrong bite
beaten from my muzzle
(but is maybe one bite
less for you).
I know ‘no’ but you
don’t know them.
Listen, No-Fang:
I’m wild-blooded, red-clawed,
but I learned how to lay next to you,
to forgo food
when you starved,
a warm heap
at your cold feet.
Now that my bones
are chewed by time,
I’m just like you.
Slow with no bite.
A broken bark and the world
behind a veil of milk.
Oh, is that your hand?
Yes. Clawless and full of sun,
I know those hands
even in the dark.