Get used to the cold.
Buy snowshoes and lick the sharp spines of cleavers.
Leave your windows open to the chill and take
showers of hot steam and unscented abrasives.
Acclimate yourself to a tiger’s presence.

Do something drastic and divine.
Take four too many beta blockers and
cry until you faint while watching MeTV reruns.
Or stare down the LED lights of an eighteen-wheeler,
imagine its tire tracks on your spine.

Practice hunger by chewing on
discount beef jerky until it is dry between your teeth
then, only then, swallowing. Practice sleep
by curling over your radiator and pressing your forehead
against the iron grating.

If you want to love a tiger you must condemn
yourself to a life in the warm dark earth.
You must learn to love waiting and waiting well.
Practice waiting by your bedroom door and the
parking lot and the unplugged landline.

Your tiger will want to devour you.
Your tiger will not be your tiger at all.
You chose her, you will follow her down into her den.
Pinch your nose at the smell of decaying elk carcass and
grin as her cubs gnaw your gym shoes to shreds.

Get used to the taste of your own blood when
you kiss her dripping maw. Get used to being held inside
of her mouth completely. At any moment and in any season
the trees can dry up around you. The meat will disappear.
Whet her appetite to encourage endearment as a tool of survival.

She might close her jaw onto your wrist to sever
the hand that could darn holes in wool socks
for a few hundred calories. Say
“thank you” when she does. You’re no hero in
silvervine. She needs you, but not the way you want her to.

Your tiger walks beside you in the night.
You ask yourself why you would love something like this.
Why you stagger out of her mud-wet den in spring,
carrying her two remaining cubs in your arms.
Why you tilt their wet chins up to see the stars.

Rubbing one hand on her warm skull, you listen to her
joints pop in and out of place as she stretches all nine
feet of her skeleton. She prowls like a marionette
strung on silk. Each limb has moved in this way
a thousand times before, and will again with or without you.

Only in your old life would she cower, would
she know fear as you have. A taxi driver could crush her paw.
The Tribune Tower would arc over her like a double-barrel shotgun.
Here she is too beautiful not to kill her for it.
But God, what bliss of lying on her stomach in your twin bed.

Of her whiskers twitching, dreaming of nothing but
another day alive. How lucky, to know you were built to be
exactly what you are. One day after seasons of patience
tell her how you have waited all winter to speak to her.
Make your desire known in the daylight.