June (We’re waiting for our dog to die)

We’re waiting for our dog to die.

She stopped eating three days ago

and is weakening like a star receding

into the static and snow

and dust of the universe’s edge,

the static of the past

as we understand it, a record you can’t

wipe clean. At once, it’s fast

and slow, the receding I mean. I really

can’t see her go and yet

she seems more gone whenever I look.

Does that make sense? We get

our stories in pieces I suppose.

Maybe the real fiction

of fiction is when it’s fluid and clear,

when the only actual friction

is in conflict and not in time.

Or maybe what’s happening

is when I see the dog I see

myself—Kate and me bringing

her home from the shelter, bringing our babies

home to meet her, my selves

slipping into the ravenous black.

The way the present shelves

itself onto the past, like a boat

beached with significant speed,

we often don’t see the past below us.

But when some bit is freed,

by an unexpected gesture or word

or Ellie’s wasting face,

we’re shocked to see how much is there.

Its practiced formal pace

has a fetish for displacing us

with us. I don’t know how much

longer Ellie has, but we’ll keep her

comfortable. I’ll touch

her bones through her skin and think of my life.

Selfish asshole, you might

be saying, but what else can I do?

I am mourning my lack of insight,

I am mourning the displacement, which is

as normal as a daisy.

I am mourning time’s relentlessness

and its wide caves of lazy

hours that toy with our sense of story,

the one we thought we could write,

the romance of a gilded day

ending with endless night.