Dog Talk

‘Old Spice’ and wet grass carry years of understanding between us. What I wear and you gather into you, become a language neither of us know, but comprehend in mouse-tracks of deduction. You read grease and engine oil, as if grease and engine oil were two parts of a book left out in the wet, a chemical patois revealed by an inborn knowledge of petroleum pipes, and the long-distance howls of Alaskan wolves. If I break wind, you run to me, body rapt and heeding, every hair translating a smudged paragraph or two into volumes of memory. Rubbernecking my attention with a fixed gaze, (No, Timmy has not fallen down an abandoned mine shaft), you are just staring at my next question, willing to jaw with more whiffs of intimacy. Tales of muddy boots, the flash-fiction of urine trails, (hers and her canine buddies, not mine), the breezy gossip of each rabbit hole. A jargon of us both surfacing in her millpond eyes, idioms cresting now on her black nose, a cloddish lingo, but it outruns anything that could be said.