Heid E. Erdrich

She wants to grow from the rich-rotten trunk of the stamp left to sprout in the chain-linked alley yard. She wants to be born there. Or out of dry wind rushing debris around and cleaning the world like a slate that hasn’t yet written how her birth will be if she be born slick-wet and shimmering in rings like gas spill, born from long trickles run off curb-piled snow that flows in curtains any northern winter when it is possible to burn in water, when flakes against skin so cold brand their pattern on the new-thought, engraved self.

Dogs so long with us we forget that wolves allowed as how they might be tamed and sprang up all over the globe, with all humans, all at once, like a good idea. So we tamed our own hearts. Leashed them or sent them to camp’s edge. Even the shrinks once agreed, in dreams our dogs are our deepest selves. Ur Dog, a Siberian, dogged the heels of nomads, then turned south to Egypt to keep Pharaoh safe. Seemed strange, my mother sighed, when finally we got a hound, . . . a house without a dog. Her world never knew a yard un-dogged and thus unlocked. Sudden intrusions impossible where yappers yap. Or maybe she objected to empty armchairs, rooms too quiet without the beat of tail thump or paw thud. N’de, Ojibwe say,my pet, which also suggests ode, that spot in the chest, the part you point to when you pray, or say with great feeling—great meaning, meaning dog-love goes that deep.