print previewback SPENCER HANVIK
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 . . . 
Regret Economies
Wolves Grovel at the Gate of an Abandoned Fourteenth-Century Hermitage