Dead Ends
Digit dies next to his old blue sneaker with the tongue eaten out. Moans, a windless mid March afternoon, squirrels doing it in the English Walnut overhead when they had been thinking about what to do next, rather than what not to do as was so often the concern, quite aside from this new death leaking into the fresh cut grass —The four other dogs? Yeah, sure — they circle the still warm body, a density around mystery to loop and leap beyond a freak rain that night. Part homage, part fever — anything can be soothing against the blur of squirrels in heat, when nothing is moving and nothing is not moving and nothing is more easy to forget than the road has always been there, the cars, the uncanny ability to slip-slide across traffic, old Digit’s skidding over the gravel, this fluency he had down slinky as a ghost for ten years, him always after some damned cat, always needing to shake it right up to that point where the world can end, wanting to feel it in his mouth.