Canis Familiarus

Moist weeds, the wet black nose patrolling & the noise he emits—from nostril

or throat I can never tell—oddly Victorian,

a steam engine’s hiss & squeal, inching forward from Waterloo or St. Pancras.

& now and then the beagle bay

from his years in the hunt pack, before we found him wandering the roadsides

of Prince George County. Too old, dumped,

& inside his ear a tattooed number faded to seven inexplicable digits.

The loquacious receptors, thousands

upon thousands. & Milo, three times the size of Thomas, with eyes darting,

the panopticonic taking-in, like a drone

above Waziristan, uploading terrain; the two of them collaborating

only to mark—mailbox, phone pole,

the neighbors’ zinnias, now & then looking up at me, not leading them

so much as dragged. Such distance

to have ventured from the Pleistocene steppes, windswept tundra,

from our human & wolf dog

forebears, twinned packs, helixed for the hunt with their array of inventions

putting Edison & Tesla both to shame.

Tooled spear-point, atlatl, bone needle, sinewed thread for mukluk, shawl

& tunic. Together they will stalk to extinction

the mammoth, the aurochs, the cave bear, the Neanderthal.

Yet the great innovation, Shipman argues,

is the fashioning of wolf to dog, the making of “a living tool.”

Co-conspirators, corporate, the Ur-

mega merger. The dual-synced packs, weaving & worrying the straggler mammoth

until she falls to a deathbed of tundra moss.

& the systematic rendering begins. Gaze directed silent hunting, permitting

man & wolf dog to stare directly

at the prey’s last moment of consciousness, the huge imperial eye beclouded

& the pitilesshuman sclera, eloquent

starburst to flame on a screen, cars overturned, a single figure writhing

by a blown-off steel door.

What distance have we ventured? Let us be Sky Gods; let us rain

our fire down, assisted by

our laser-guided SAMs, our canid minions. The makers, the inventors,

the fashioners of living tools.

YouTube footage of Oppenheimer, grainy b & w. He tamps his pipe against

the podium: the physicists have known Sin,

& this is a knowledge they cannot lose. The always-Manichaean bewilderment.

The dogs meet my eyes,

tugging me home, legs lifted simultaneously against a wildly empurpled

crepe myrtle. Last night I dozed off

to wolf dog burials, book lying open on my chest. Predmosti—what is now

the Czech Republic—30,000 BP.

Encircling the human cemetery, a fairy ring of dog skulls, as if to guard

their Masters through some dim, imperiled

notion of an afterlife. To sound forever their alarms. The bark & deep-throated

growl. What will survive of us?

Appetite, some shards of DNA & the undeserved perplexing loyalty

of living tools. Tenderly a man

is burying in permafrost a severed head, which formerly bore a name.

Tenderly he has sliced it below a collar he has

woven from the softest hairs of ermine or fox. He places in the jaw a small

carved mammoth bone & is stroking & stroking

the rough fur of the forehead, a dead language murmured as he closes the eyes.