Dog love
Dog Love
In the gray dawn conception of an Idaho snowstorm
My daughter rolls on the floor with a dog I can’t stand
She’s 8 and he’s 2
Both beyond potty training
Their bond is a tightrope I once shared with my father’s dog
Back when my impatience did not intrude on love
She defends his chewing
His carving up of my valuables
Tables, chairs, books, dolls, cookies, banisters, taxidermy
This dog is a devourer of the produced
But she is a devourer of the impatient
You can’t get rid of him
I love him
I love him too but not like she does
Juggling divorce and job, money and debt
His daily duty proves too heavy for my plastic hand
But she sees nothing of the bars I put around my own soul
She only sees him
Begging for love
Like she does
When we snuggle after reading
Dog Barking
I have this dog
He looks at me like I’m not a wretch
Like I’m not a sinner forlorn to let him down
But his tail still wags with hope of what I might be
The owner he’s deserved since the sac broke
A fence he lives in now
We all live in fences
Sometimes we open the gate and the world is a rainbow
Sometimes the clouds rain mortgages
If I let him go will he come back?
Will he be calm like my hand against his back?
Or will he turn himself over to the wild?
Never to be seen again in this world of cement
We are all dogs barking at the gate
Close Out The Night
If there’s a place where insecurity dies I haven’t found it
She walks by me to another task
The door stays open and the wind blows
The dog doesn’t get up to see who’s footsteps
Are walking hard on hardwood
Another owner neglecting responsibility
Another spouse neglecting love
What is this thing we look for
This fullness of heart and body
A satisfied union without regret
A never ending peace of now
I spelt alone in another bed
She’s asleep upstairs
The dog knows these sounds
I pull the covers over my eyes
And close out the night with dream
Birddog Heart
God if there was a world
That made sense to my perception
I’d walk along the fields of grass
The place where pheasants hide
My bird dogs sniffs them out
A charged nose searching for the flush
My heart wanders in search of wings
My soul is a bird dog on the hunt
The only game its ever found
Worth the boots I walk on
And the pain it took to get there
Are the blue eyes I spoke to yesterday
And the red lips that made men march
To armies in search of death for cause
The only thing worth dying for
Her lips her eyes her heart
