Monday, October 22, 2018

Harper

for robyn
I am grabbing at life today
silhouettes of dogwood,
white ash, and tulip poplar
a delirious pleasure
the light through the trees
illuminates particles
i know we are the dust of it all.
harper can smell the fragments
in green blades, smoke, and vermin miles away.
her dark wet nose and keen mind
will know up to forty feet
what is buried below the ground
only she knows what is stale
in the rafts and scurf
the biological richness
of my human debris.
isn’t the devastation and the
trauma of grief tangled into
the molecules
the bits and seeds
of me?
we share the bed now and i know
sometimes i would be there
with my love in the ground and beyond
if it weren’t for her—the urgent muzzle
in the morning at my chin
the soft whine.
harper squints
at the sun greedy with
the blue-rich sky
her coat against my cheek
feels warm and soft
like fresh laundry pulled out
and hung to dry
her tag reads her name
still with both of our phone numbers
and both of our names
printed on the back.


-Leah Herzing

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