It’s a day when I can say the word ‘bitch’
and mean it affectionately.
She’s nothing stylish, just a brown lab
trotting at my side.
Her blood runs high and deep
but she doesn’t wave it in the noses of her peers.
A new-age farmer neighbor waves.
She accounts for him but remains silent.
A flock of starlings attracts her attention.
But she does not chase them.
She may wonder why
this is not a hunting expedition,
why I don’t put her to the work
for which she was bred.
But she doesn’t whine about it.
Dragging dead birds out of a lake
may be her vocation,
but, for all the way she sometimes
pleads with eyes and tongue,
she has retired before she ever started work.
Of course, the squirrels don’t know that.
And a vole skitters away into the underbrush
while, high in a tree, a blue jay
warns the neighborhood of our presence.
We can’t communicate our good intentions.
Nor, in her case, subjugated ones.
We sit at the edge of the pond
and she curls up beside me.
From turtles to salamanders to tiny silver fish,
every creature does as nature intended.
Only the dog is drawn to instinct but then abstains.
Only the dog stands corrected.
