Two boys laugh from the creek
bed up the briar-tangled ravine
and come upon a bird blue
and white, breast fluffy, tail
feathers stiff, eye
socket
hollow,
as sunburst
ants flurry
out from
beneath the
wavering eyelid.
__________
That Old Dog
and blind, the one eye gutted by a Doberman,
the other dulled by years of sight, so when I cross
the threshold she must hobble onto quiv’ring paws,
and piddle t’ward the sound of somber footfalls
to grope her humid muzzle cross my steady thighs,
and prop her flank catawampus against my knees.
I rub her oily fur, shed thin and dark as rot.
The tumor on her spine is swelling, plumb-sized now,
irregular and knotted, hairless, slick. She plods
away and sets back down with many tender steps,
long past the autumn evenings, soggy leaves in mouth,
when she would bark down mountains just to bite the wind.
__________
Patrick Shuler has been published before in the Clapboard House, and his work will soon appear in the anthology Catastrophia.
