Two Dogs Loving On the Levee
Now I could fall into cliches, this rarified air
feathering your hair,
and see what was hitherto hidden to me. You
are beautiful.
Outshined by the Dalmations, the Weimaraners,
their fine coats
sheening in the sunlight. But now your mottled fluff
is the softest
sweetest breath of life. I am blind born, the river’s core,
freshly whelped.
____
You’re no jewel yourself, but you I’d noticed. How
not to? All
gristle and slobber. Snapping fool, sniffing after
every bitch
that barked, like all the others licking themselves
silly. Now
there’s nothing rough in you. Delicious hooks
you’ve brought
to my haunches: the river, the treeline, it’s moist and
new. You run
fire spitting through the center of me. So I will
have my howl,
my whimper. Celebrate your wet and earth-clawed sound
in plain air,
____
our breaths tugging at vying horizons. The stroke of my
owners voice.
Yours too calls, but something wild has brought us, locked
us here,
clamped like my boldest teeth on your precious, grass-
stained collar.
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