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Door accidentally left ajar and the new dog’s gone, a splendid flame devouring the open road. I scream her name— the one anthropomorphized into being as she licked my fingers through the bars at the pound—and am not surprised it has no claim on her. Shocked at the profundity of my grief, I scour the neighborhood on foot— wet-faced, unhinged— then in my car, windows open, yelling hoarsely into the wind, but she’s split. The streets rebuke me with their emptiness. Our mammal blood finds beauty in some furred beings, as clearly as in a human face. I see hers with all the gravity of a memorial portrait, remember how we joked “she’s a beauty and she knows it,” as if that beauty reflected positively on us!, how we chuckled as her long white rump fur swung to and fro as she trotted chicly before us—like tassels dangling from a chorus girl’s bodice. An hour later there she is, on the porch, waiting politely to be let in, the vixen! She settles into her corner of the living room, agrees to her evening walk on the leash, licks my cheek when I bend to release her again. And though I feel like the teacher whose student sat in the front row, gah-gah-eyed all quarter, then slammed her on the evals, of course I forgive my dog (as if she understood that) because something lost--so missed-- returned, returns more than what was lost. Oh children are patted down again, comforters drawn to their chins, parents in easy chairs after tucking real children in--not touching pictures to their lips, hating themselves for that second they weren’t vigilant—kith and kin at home in their tracts, ancestors tucked into his and her plots, none of them flooded into the next county, tsunamied to another country—you think this is too much, but look at us, one furred, one not, neighborly as we were in our Pleistocene cave at the beginning of our long and peaceful friendship, our housebreaking of the wild, not scheduled to burn up in the sun, but at home at the hearth of the world, our scents marked here forever. Published in The Cimarron Review 163, Spring, 2008
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