Dog Gospel

When I dare at last to imagine hunger,

see farmer wandering his parched fields

knowing nothing to do, finally, but sleep

the day out in the barn's long shadow,

dreaming of the family dog he drove

deep into a neighboring county

and abandoned by the side of the road.

Weeks later a boy finds it in a ditch—

timid and gimp, a halo of gnats

festering between its swollen testicles

and wormy flanks—and he coaxes it

into some pines, tethers it with a tentstake

and a chain as the late summer light

spirals and drapes over the branches,

a mirage the dog slavers and snaps at.

Consider the boy's amusement

as he imagines the animal jerking the light

down and the ruckus of bells that clang

and catapult from the treetop belfries,

the canopy rent like a piñata, spilling licorice

and circus peanuts, coins and fluttering dollar bills.

The real possibilities are beyond him.

The dog as a parable of pain or loss.

Hunger as some small iridescent thing at work

inside the animal, hovering around its heart

the way a lone dragonfly skirts the dry pond crater,

dismantling the day—light unstitched

from dust, dust unbuckled from air.

By now, the dog's given up, and the boy

watches its tongue loll in the pine needles,

the heave and fall of its stomach, its eyes

following birdflight in and out of the shade.

Restless for something he cannot name,

he imagines the music he might make

if he thumped the dog's belly like a drum.

Imagines its eyes are the color of iron.

Imagines the unimaginable and does it,

the tire tool and the belly unwilling instruments,

and the dog's caterwaul is not like music

at all and when night comes the cricketsong

dulcifies nothing, the dog's body

is just a body, is not paltry, is not glorified.

What hunger is this that haunts the boy,

that haunts the man sleeping in the shade?

Watch as the dragonfly dips into his open mouth

and keeps going, a blur between bone and sinew,

a wet thread collapsing soft caverns of flesh,

gone to where his body is a field

honed by sleeves of sunlight,

to where the boy ceases to be and the man wakes.

He knows what flits through him now

keeps the time with its thrumming,

carrying him away from himself

into himself, to where the dog roves in the shadows—

ravenous, luminous—its tail bobbing

in the heat, a winnowing sliver of light.