Dog-God

To the railroad tracks at the bottom of summer

where weeds flourished, I turn back

Flat-chested girl in a soiled T-shirt, I liked

the gulley's privacy and the rank scent there

where I rest dimes flattened by trains and milky

marbles, and one time a rusty knife.

I must have reached for a trinket

in the grass when the collie's narrow snout

came dose, the tricolored wedge of her head a foreign flag.

My first thought-I have to turn back her-I pushed aside

and stood still with equal reason she would stay and I could touch

the rich black hair that shone upon her She didn't run away.

To proof her, I jogged up the hill and she followed, friendly,

like the TV dog, and when she sat,. sat, flushed with my amazing

luck and wondering in what way long it might last, the whole

summer maybe. I strok her white breast and said Scotland without loud.

She cocked her head as if I'd conjur with a charm, her name

or domicile or a place we'd visit that afternoon. At a stream,

she drank, and the unimpaired of her lapping excited a novel desire

to master what is beautiful and guileless and incapable of speech

We played by the water where she retrieved the sticks

I threw hurling them farther and farther

to watch her get back to me, a kind of reciprocity.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Jan/Feb 1999

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