The Double Leash

Blizzard to lilac. Dandelion to leaf. Endless variation of seasons I note in passing, smells I cannot smell: rotting gardens, feces, musk of cat. These two run in front of me, golden shoulder to patchwork, heads lifted or lowered into scent, tongues lolling. Ears damp with their own spittle and each other's tell me, tethered a pace behind, their journey's epic: tipping forward to the familiar or stranger's distant yap; angling to my breathing, whispered praise, my slightest suggestion. Ignored. The shepherd throws herself into any whirring wheel, to herd the neighbor's tractor mower or the UPS truck's packets home; pulling her back, the golden's oblivious ballast, instinct heading always for the gutter's deepest puddle, her own way within the forked leash's one-foot range. As we pass, the clans set up their barking, as if we were news, gathering center of a congenial warning din—mine answer with disturbances of pace, an extra pull or lollop, grins thrown slant-eyed over shoulders until one hears a call she can't ignore, surrenders to baying's ferocious joy moving through muscle and bone. Moving storm, storm's eye: happy universes whirl in their skins as I do in mine. Unknowable, their fate. Mediums between foreign principalities, they're tied to me, to each other, by my will, by love; to that other realm by song, and tooth, and blood.