Wolves Grovel at the Gate of an Abandoned Fourteenth-Century Hermitage

Miles away, a man dreams in perfect silence

that he starves to death in a forest

in a world he doesn’t recognize.

The gate remains closed against him.

The wolves smell mice

living inside the walls.

He watches the world fall on its side,

the shapes fade into each other.

And that’s the end. The man wakes up,

composes himself, returns to his home

in the twenty-first century.

The dwindling wolves beg at the gate,

trembling on the precipice of a country

in an insignificant night sky

with an asteroid’s arc,

the debris field, the flying darts . . .