It Was So Dark Inside the Wolf by Frank X. Gaspar
Who hasn’t lodged in the belly of something, who hasn’t been devoured?
It Was So Dark Inside the Wolf
All day with nothing on my mind, the soft old couch, the heating pad, a book of Tennessee Williams’s letters, tea, camembert, beer, soup, dozing, speaking in tongues off in my drowsing mind, invoking this or that god, thinking of raising my fortunes, thinking of all of this swimming forward without me someday, this bag of small wishes, the greatest sorrows indelible and indistinct in the afternoon’s haze: I cannot remember who said that our salvation must come from a turn within our own nature and that there are no turns and there is no nature. Oh, it was so dark inside the wolf said the little girl with the basket after the hunters had killed that beast who had eaten her, after they had cut him open to let her out, although you don’t hear that version so often anymore. Surely this is significant. Who hasn’t lodged in the belly of something, who hasn’t been devoured? Do you remember? Maybe it is something for you like an old tune that haunts you, that makes you so suddenly sad when you see a place where the carpet is coming up or where the screen door is sagging on a desperate hinge. Unbearable, this material music dissipating the neighborhood around you into nothing. How does one rise from this torpor and say, I don’t know what to do anymore? Outside the trees have sneaked above the line of the neighbor’s wall. How did I not notice? They make a tiny forest along our city driveway. They are as dark and deep as it gets here. I am still trying to rise up from the loveliness of dying objects into the loveliness of whatever it is they point to. I’m trying to get at just how things are, to adjust to that, but then I start shaking. Isn’t that how it is with you? It was so dark inside, but that’s not the whole story. They are leaving something out. I can feel it in the sleepless night when I run my hands over the openings in doorways. I can feel it when my own heart delivers all my secrets to my enemies. I can feel it when the poem doesn’t turn, but heads for the bottom with a hook in its mouth or when the sky runs to the color of tin and the sparrows disguise themselves as leaves in the hedge waiting for their moment. Isn’t that how it is with you?
Night of a Thousand Blossoms (Alice James Books, 2004)





Of course that's how it is with me! Ha ha ha, how wonderful!
Have to order one of his books now. Wonderful poem.