Another poem about dogs

Ring

Some dog you were, invisible

                 At night

Draped in a black serape

Topped with a frayed balaclava

Worn rakishly or slightly askew

           One

Only the antic silent film

Flicker of luminous orphaned

Legs to give you away

Phosphorescent afterglow

Of a calligraphic tail

Ghosting white at my margin

Of sight, sweep of the yard

Mullioned by the metronome  

Of the porch swing chain

With its parched dry

                               Bleat

You worried cows

With crumpled horns

Crumbled before

the overwhelming urge

to kill guileless rabbits

your methods improvised

                                       Slapdash

Kept to the scrim of shade

                      Bearding

The house in high summer

A big post and beam affair

Tin roof feeding a stone cistern

Three chimneys wide as player pianos

Perched high above tombs of hearths

Sealed shut ever since

The Rural Electrification Act of 1935

A mothballed Cunard liner

Plated in whitewashed

Clapboard, staterooms

abandoned starboard and aft

When Mamaw and Papaw

Took to the lifeboats

Paring it down to parlor and kitchen

where we’d sit listening for the milk truck

A.M. station out of Seymour

Broadcasting the morning

Farm report through the screen door

Where you sat rapt and swept

dew from the flagstone

waiting on breakfast  

“Skim milk, crusts, middlings, bits

of doughnuts, wheat cakes with drops

of maple syrup sticking

to them, potato skins, leftover custard

pudding with raisins, and bits

of Shredded Wheat.”  *

one warm summer morning

on one of our annual visits south

wondering, perhaps, whether

any of us noticed

your apparent transformation

from last year’s

beagle collie mix

to some kind of variation

on shepherd mastiff terrier
another Mandarin 
of the Ring Dynasty. 

*Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White