When wolves first meet up
they have a ritual
of smelling one other’s breath
One wolf will put his nose
to the mouth of another, asking
What have you been hunting?
The second wolf exhales
thick breath, hot with blood and sulfur
to explain, You can still smell the kill
But nothing tells this story quite as well
as a human. My father took me
hunting every autumn
Crouched down in the forest
beside him, I felt the gravity of this genre,
the deepness of its roots
extending so far beyond men.
It was the sensation of soil
working its way
into the grooves of my skin,
the crunch of detritus underfoot.
It becomes a type of language, like a prayer
In college, I would later learn some theories
which suggest that the human kiss began
as a mouth-to-mouth greeting
like that of the wolf.
I knew this immediately to be true;
my father is a wolf.
Always quick and deliberate; gutting his animal
in perfect technique. He taught me how
to split open the ribcage and reach inside—
you have to grab the heart and sever the moorings.
But still, there is a right way
and a wrong way
to kill an animal.

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“Every heart is also a cave.” – Marvelous :):) – Tim
Why, thank you. I may post the full poem on my site soon.
love the last lines