If you had come into that room
after her stroke to find
my mother-in-law Sue Reed
and me, our heads bent
toward each other, making facesso her face would remember
what it had forgot
of the expressions for surprise
and dismay, or if
you had come in the momentI tried to teach her lips
by forming small lips
and making them breathe,
first to the left, then
to the right of my nose
until she began to laugh,
and laugh because she couldn’t
on one side, and both
of us laughed, you might
have imagined what we did
had less to do with instruction
or sorrow than the antics
of lovers, she giving me
her hand then, I taking it
in mine to stroke it
over and over in the pleasure
of being together in the room
where you might have come
to imagine the two of us
together, just as we were.
It is not what,
carrying that
afterthought of legs,
he runs to, and not
what his interrogative, foldy
face detects
on the floor, because
it is always changing, always
turning out to be
some other bug
or bush his nose wanted,
leaving his tail
smoldering
behind, and
it is never,
after all that scratching
and lifting of leg,
enough; not even
after he joins
the dinner party, smiling
upside-down
and rolling
his testicles, not even
in his whimpering sleep,
dreaming in the tips
of his paws
that he is chasing
it, that very thing
which, scratching,
he can’t quite
reach, nor sniffing find,
because in the perfect
brainlessness of dog,
he will never know
what it is.
