Musculature

The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, so I’m told — that I used to live with, she’d follow me everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s more the truth. It is the truth. And now this dog — that I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty, like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s taken me, just to half-understand that. Pretty much my whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably, gets stripped away: what hope, otherwise, for suffering? When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay inside of, I’m not saying forever, I could last a fair time on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose command through a summer garden. Let those plants that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.