Our Dog Howling at Sunset

At sunset, the dog howls at sirens in town.
If he were snowbound in Talkeetna,
A hundred miles from nowhere,
What would he howl at instead?

I saw my husband trudging through the frost,
His blue jacket half-tinted orange and red,
“I don’t like the way you sound,” he said
As he left, deserting one who was already lost.

If I were a thousand miles from him now,
Listening to the wolves’ mournful cries,
And my beloved shunning me as he does now,
Would I pretend to believe my lover’s lies?

Or, instead, would it be enough to exist
Where the short summer dies on winter’s grist,
And true love’s a dream born on a dreamer’s mist,
And the one to stay with is the one you’ve just kissed?

If I lived in a land so cruel and hard,
Would I be bargaining with my soul?
If love’s short date were but a moon’s silver shard,
Would he be a passing thought, and my son the whole

Of any future we had scattered out on the snow,
Or caught in the rime-bound trees?
Would I see then what I already know—
That his future lies with himself and not me?

As our wolf howls a timeless wail to the air
I can listen and guess at its season.
I can comfort myself it will always be there,
Beyond human hopes, beyond reason.

Far wiser, the black-furred hound, than I,
To sing out his ancient song.
Waiting, watching, as we struggle and die,
Only to pass his wisdom along.

Waiting, hoping as he does for a touch,
He is made to think that he asks too much--
Waiting for a kind word or loving hand--
Wild and alone, in humanity’s bleak land.

A southern writer once lamented the lack
Of courage in humankind,
And suggested we borrow the strength we see
In the branches of an olive tree.

Yet there’s more courage in the dog-wolf’s cry,
Penned out on our city-cropped lawn,
As if he knows the grief of my son and I
When the man we both love is gone.

“Could we not as well” take a lesson from him,
Our wild and loyal friend?
To howl out our sorrow and loneliness,
Though the pain might never end?

Now, in the twilight I hear my lover return,
With no greeting to me, and I burn
For the summer’s newborn passion I recall.
The twilight wolf’s mourning tells it all:

That we never will have what we had before
That love can die just as well as it’s born,
That a child is the only one who restores
What is lost to the lonesome, the wolves, the forlorn.


July 6, 2001

I never knew until now,
Dear Dad, though
I listened to the stories you told,
Of War that re-ignited after the one supposed,
To end all wars, or so it was proclaimed.

You went abroad, your Varsity
Stalled, dreams put aside,
Long before I was born,
Before you met my mother or I was named.

Instead, you wanted to fly,
High above the Bay of Bengal
And the Andaman Sea,
Above the carnage, or so you said.
And that must have seemed a way to save
That sanity
You needed to take you through,
To come back and marry a beloved girl.

I watch the newsreels now,
They are old, with time and victory ingrained.

I can see you flying that high,
Himalayan peaks shining in your eyes,
Cold death above and horror below.
You told me stories, I recall,
Too young for me to imagine.
Now too old for me to hear them all.

You never piloted again
Except in your nightmares.
On a road between moon and sun
In your own history you flew
The infamous, undying path
Of The Burma Run.

Life is a puzzle
That won't be solved
By the argument of your mind.
It can neither be cracked
In ivory towers
Nor in the parlors of grapevine.
The mystery of life
Crowns the benighted
With a twist of a wand
Leaving the enlightened
To commune with the dark.
At best, it is a glass enclosure
Attuning your moves
Along the belt of blessing
Beneath the shelter of stars
And at its worst,
A dungeon floor
Delineating your lot
In unbending reality
Under the dome of despair.
Exposed to eternal pumping
Of raw information,
Student of life knows
But a speck of curricula
At any given time
The process of life's lessons
Extends well beyond the grave
Not even multiple lifetimes
May suffice to scratch the surface
Let alone discover the core
Yet the student of life
Knows no limit
Goes to village today
And metropolis tomorrow
Mounts a mustang to Shangri-la
Hops on a boat to outland.
Tantamount to the amount of stars
Are pictures of life
Full of synonyms and antonyms
Boding inflections and reflections
Of thought, taste and bearing
In the academy of day-and-night.

Rampant, errant fog
Along a river’s shore,
Once caressing silt and log,
But it vanished just before

The stolen, wayward plumes
Along the glistening sand,
Kissed and missed the ground,
Then fled into a different land.

Mist surrendered fast,
Beneath spears of lowering light,
And silver swords that fight,
Shivering silver into glass.
And Dawn lay down at last.