My new job is to keep the dog
entertained, this is OK — snow tunnels,
balls, wood to chew, extracting items —
pillows, socks, hats, pencils,
good-smelling bread knife,
I forget to feed the fire and it dwindles,
forget to turn on the front porch light,
it remains dark on the stoop.
In the Great Grandmother's country
stolen things are retrieved, they say
the dog comes back for its bone,
the ship its timber — jaggedy, dark around
bolt holes, rotted, but now dry as kindling
The door for its hinges. But then
the cow and tree? It's a puzzle.
Down the lane, ghosts dip
from alder branches — the girls were here,
they restored the ghosts, twisted plastic bags
into heads and tattered skirts
to hang from branches, black penned faces
rise and sway in the wind,
up the lane into a different world,
where I walked from my desk and fire,
we can try — to look more closely into a wave
and see the darter there,
court the gusts behind snow.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 186, no. 3, June 2005. Used with permission.