Dogs in the Night

Dogs in the Night

A transformer blows at sunset. Night comes early
to settle us like lowering infants to a crib
or small bath. Floodlights and streetlamps cool

in the dark filling the backyards and easements. 
The only sound is the barking of a dog 
usually let inside, a few last calls into the night 

before a brief robe slides a glass door open and shut. 
There is a darkness that is not made, but found, 
the shadow cast in the risen moon 

and what is swallowed by the black angle 
of its open jaws. A gray shape folds into itself 
and disappears at the base of a birch, 

bark silvered with moonlight. A watchful hour, 
then lamps again, a ripple out to the horizon,
where in a few hours, morning will rise 

on those expecting it, noses tucked into thick fur 
growing lighter from pacing with the sun. 

Two Choices

Two rabbits lick their wounds under a row of boxwoods.
Deep color spills through their heathered fur, like a doubtful
brushstroke on a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape. 

A color similar to the folds and pleats of rose red
and begonia pink that blossomed from a furry bulb
pressed into the crown of concrete—some squirrel

dashing between curbs. Vonnegut paraphrased Nietzsche:
Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.
Only an animal at rest can afford the time to bleed. 

The boxwoods offer temporary cover. A red-tailed hawk
tests the image. Unable to carry both, the surety of its grip
is proved in the constancy of its flight, its lack of slowing down. 

A Day Falling Apart

and not coming together, you say. The afternoon light sinks
into the dark grain of a new walnut bookshelf.

You are unsettled by its dim shape in the periphery 
unbalancing a careful living room. The day disappears 

under a blanket of clouds, sunlight diffusing to a single gray, 
like mixing all the colors in art class as a child, 

the paint irredeemable. Wing nuts trace the outline 
of a cat carrier taken apart to clean out vomit. 

A half-slice of chocolate cake dries out in the kitchen.
The screw to hang the clock no longer bites

into the plaster. The chipped dish is still chipped. 
But words that lose meaning are hardest to reassemble—

love, apologies, names of the past. If I could put one thing back,
it would be this: I’d place the strand of hair 

covering your mouth behind your ear, so I could tell you 
how perfectly each lip’s curve is received by its opposite relief. 

Lost at Sunset

Almost pre-memory, the fired sky
of Colorado’s front range at sunset.

Moving away from it, now thirty years
distant, it is less memory than sensation,

like a thrill told to me and kept
as my own. The world was small enough

to lose in a dozen steps. I rounded a fence
of pines as my family headed to dinner 

at the lodge. Following a set of stairs
cut into the rocks above our cabin,

I was out of earshot. When do we
become aware of the past, 

that first moment we see a chain 
of moments trailing us, marking our way?

Like astronomers who can only look
so far back in time—a bright wall 

of glowing gas shrouding the start of it all—
I remember a sky burning and vast.

My hands were bleeding from slipping down
a gravel slope, my breathing hot and often,

when my tight vision was broken by the riot
of a clearing in the pines, the western ridges

black against the glowing clouds. A moment’s
held breath, then back to the blur of panicked sight, 

searching for my mother’s face in the rocks and trees,
not old enough to remember anything else.