About the Dog

 

About the Dog

Yesterday and some of the day before

the paths he'd blown after the snow

were shrinking and their walls

were shrinking and our shared

memory of the dog we kept brief

and needing us both was now gone and

was now shrinking.  Something near

warming was blowing over it

a caress of breath perhaps a coaxing

before the long winter days began

to settle in and we were again alone

with each other.  The birds, jonquils,

and chickadees, and, like the dawn on

the morning after the dog went to

a new family a couple of mourning

doves like it had to be some sad

cliché (actually I looked at the one

in the seed box for so long I thought

it must be dead and someone some

thing had set it there in the night

so somehow out me to being

a fraud, but I saw

its pink eye blink and realized

because it was 10 below zero it was

puffed against the cold) would get

lost on the floor of the newly blown

snow.  How one last time around we

went, the dog and me, through the labyrinth

and found our way back, leash her

string and tugged ourselves up into 

the furnace's breath exhaling in 

the dining room.  Fool.  I'll go all winter

and somehow on into the rest of my winters

being brave and taking nothing even

if it is required because somehow I've 

earned it by not getting over the dog

I saw into before his throat opened

and I was almost into it like a girl-

baby Jonah, and all those years

in the stomach-convulsive dark

the breech of peristalsis and then

getting quite used to it all: the heave

of the walls, the constantly wet floor,

the sheets of sick and stink.  At least

I always thought it would be this way.  

Somehow these paths came to me now

like a kind of esophagus, and its meander,

not at all the straight shot we're taught it is

in elementary biology.  The truth 

of the matter is there's all manner

of things: every object  we swallow

can get hung up: can hang like

a painting for years, one that's been

on the same wall for so long even

when its taken down there's that imprint,

lie a red-rub of a hair elastic perched

on the wrist, how it's sitting on the skin

and bone beneath the sleeve cuffs innocent

and moving only when its told but otherwise

just sitting and digging in and leaving

a mark round and round the wrist

that will always be mistaken for

negligence instead of penance.