the ceiling above me is an egg shell white.
i know this because i painted it.

at night,
thanks to the glow of my twenty-first-century typewriter,
it is gray.

but not the ghastly gray of a winter's sky––
not the reminding gray of an old man's hair––
the gray of charcoal from a pencil that writes too faintly.
faint enough that you squint to force it out against the pure white behind it and the blue line below it.
and when it appears to you, formed and shaped and sounded out,
it tells you everything you needed to hear.

.
One day gone in the long great forest
Of the ancient world, wolves alone
And mighty hungered with true kin
Stalking the tundras of the snow drifts
And all their prey, with cautionary eyes
Moved in heards and flocks swaying
With the sounds of the forest floor
And the spearing grasses.  The wolf
Was his own master, free, unbounded.
A great spirit, brother to the moon.

One dying day, when the bushes burned
They came upon the garbage dumps
Of early man.  Their smoke was laden
With the smell of fresh ****, small skins,
Animals, ended trail, and salted death.
Many wolves circled in fear, their pits,
Only one or a few tasted the left overs
The easy scraps and bones, tailings,
The elder pack would not stoop for.
These few unguarded wolves morphed
And mated with each other, their mane
And fur, soon was tamed, soon became
Mottled and brown no silver remaining.
This was the fall of the wolf, not man
And the moon turned white, when wolf
Became dog.