Hour Of The Wolf Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Senses heightened for Halloween,
I become a werewolf, her heart ululating
At my jaws, like the very rabbit, torn
And velveteen, caught on the ribs of thorns:
We sit on the grass and feed,
Grin and show our teeth, think of evil
Rhymes they use to tell children to put
Them to sleep:
Her fingers and toenails are red, and we
See close-ups of her eyes, frantically looking
Askance from the hidden camera,
Which is our eyes, and we draw her to
The earth and cigarette-butts beneath the
Swings and the falling maples,
Lounge around her neck, whispering the
Lines sunken in the bottom of the lake,
The eerie sleepers, feed of her rises and moans,
The penny-candy we rode our bicycles to,
Stealing cheap fantasies from the library on
Our way, going behind the churches on
The dirty peninsula scarred by the migrations
Of icebergs, the shivering house who stepped
Away long before our mother’s wombs nested
Us between the unsealed wax between her thighs.
The cheapest of homesteads is naked and
All but abandoned, and we change in them,
Our body curling; we begin to resemble each other:
She is a paper doll torn, though colored,
Moaning through the emasculations of incest,
A little girl runaway sleeping in the backseat of
Her grandmother’s station wagon;
The world turns blue and haunted, and she looks
Away. We creep up the hoary dunes from the
Sea; our salts boiling, she doesn’t move,
She doesn’t change; she opens her neck
Like a love letter; she knows we will have
Our way.