Turnspit

Every day the same:

They raise me high, put me in the wheel,

they bark at me to work.

Who says an animal cannot pretend?

When my life is running nowhere

and my wage is paid in bone marrow,

I need all the pretending

I can get.

I close my eyes

and nowhere becomes somewhere:

perilous wood to grassy field,

hot air to cold,

sputtering spokes to thundering hooves

of red deer teeming ahead in droves,

and I am not alone,

not alone.

The meat-smell hanging

heavy in the air

is not smoked

or fried or stewed or boiled or sweet—

it is carcass,

bloody, raw, and mine,

bloody, raw, and ours.

I retire at dawn and not at dusk

to a cave and not a cage;

and when the wheels stop

and the lights dim

and my kin disappear

I am not a dog

abandoned,

a device decommissioned,

a tool obsolete.

I am the last wolf in England

three hundred years ago—

how many is three hundred? how much is a year?

—dying nobly, dying for something,

dying wild.

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