Chasing the shadows of leaves, rolling in real
mud, the metaphorical dog doesn’t have a name
and doesn’t need one. She knows more about the sky
than any human alive: how it spins, a tall vase
shaped and reshaped by vast hands, blue to light
blue to midnight blue to pink orange gray red
and all the blues slippery as waves. There’s always
a dog in your poems, a friend once told me, though
sometimes it’s metaphorical. The metaphorical dog
lives more in her body every moment
than I do over the whole long cycle of a day,
plopping her rump suddenly to the ground
so she can scratch her silky ear, every motion
joyous and fluent. She carries Whitman’s best lines
in her mouth, drops them at my feet and looks up,
panting her doggy laugh. Am I a poem, despite
my cloak of failures? She won’t say, her tail
shedding stars as she trots away, each wag
throwing off drops of light from her swim
in the river most of us are still seeking a map for
down unlikely alleyways, under velvet concert seats,
outside our doors when we open them in the morning.
