am
just
wolf
it’s hard to think a man’s mind could last this long
without language or longing or life
if I had it in me to be anything else I’d have changed by now
all I feel is the wrongness in my ribcage and in my bones
marrow-deep and unbearable
the king looks again. still searching.
shaping a name in his mouth that he doesn’t voice
but which lingers, humming, on his tongue,
like the haunting of a kiss or the ghost of untold stories
– everything I should have been to him and wasn’t –
‘bisclavret’
say it I dare you
say it
make it real
whisper it like all those prayers you have let brand you
‘the wolf is bisclavret’
make it true
42
You
You aren’t cruel to her. You won’t have them say that you were. You won’t have them call it torture, not when you order the physician fetched to attend her, and your knights to bring her to her own home, where there might be fewer witnesses to her disfigurement. Not when you’re the one to hold that cloth and staunch the bleeding although blood soaks into the beds of your nails and you think you’ll never get it out. You cared for her once. You would not hurt her further.
But perhaps . . . perhaps you’re not gentle in how you speak to her. Perhaps you press her with questions, even while they’re still stitching up the ruins of her face and bandaging the wound. You have to know. You ask her again and again and again and perhaps – maybe – you imply that if she doesn’t answer you, you’ll have the muzzle removed from the wolf.
It’s not a threat. Nothing so explicit. But she goes pale as milk beneath the blood, and you know then that it’s true, even before she admits it in a trembling voice: ‘Yes. The wolf is Bisclavret.’
The wolf is Bisclavret.
It is as though the stars themselves move above you, the heavens refiguring themselves to paint this knowledge into their constellations. The wolf is Bisclavret, because he isn’t dead, only changed, made other by some curse or inborn nature. All thistime you have kept him close to you. You have told him of your grief, your affection for the man who is gone, all the useless impotent love you’ve felt like a burden weighing on your heart since he died because with him gone there was nowhere you could lay it to rest. You don’t know how much the wolf has understood, but you’ve found solace in speaking to him anyway, his presence staving off the loneliness and the poor decisions that come with it.
And the wolf is Bisclavret.
Has always been Bisclavret.
He has been there all along.
