This is a beginning. And in the beginning, we begin to end, even as an ending begins again. When this chapter stands complete, another will begin. _weather poem part 1: the wolf journal_ Everyone mentions the weather. Even before we ask of life and death we engage in talk of clouds and storms tracing the coastline with their fingernails. Even here in Florida, where freezing is what we who come from the North ignore, we mention the chilled rain. Even when cancers nip at body parts and art surrounds, paintings paper the walls and we talk about the weather. Wolves cry out against their capture and subjugation, yet all we see is the moon. Lovers of a season share their last bite of salmon and sip of semillon white, and comment on the night breeze. Chills run you through, thinking of those desperate nights, when you can still admit you'd give anything to have that feeling back, for that stiff breeze and chill air and oblong moon to dance by. Could it really be that easy to lock a heart away, capture her, ransom her as long as the day. But there is more sex in her than i can give, and not enough give in me to let her sex free. For all my youth I grew in a house where the old world was freshly conquered, her revenge as much mired in infancy as i was, her words carefully chosen in the bathroom mirror. I can just barely touch the memory of a grey-only television, a schoolbus where the only wiring lay in the engine, a day deconstructed from the hairs on Mr. Brunson's head and the bench seats of his taxi, distant, watched. It hurts to check my teeth for coffee stains, my day for breaks, my files for stamps. It is from this moment that the wolf in me still calls, remembers the moon in his eyes blue and burning. woman holds man, earth holds sky, you and i embrace. The wolf's revenous grey eyes bare themselves for long winter. They see cubs to guard, mates to win, prey to capture. The innocent stare will tear flesh from bone, the cropped hair of a soldier at attention, nose soft and black and human. Lips untightened, he wonders, "who, me?" and you see, you will never know him.