"Malamute" by Timothy Donnelly
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs and to the crest of my ability, for never was I a snob about it moreover never lazy, day into night through the cold pine forest we were bred to and for which I came to feel love as fast as others as a blur that slowed around us at our suppers, then watched us twitch in our heavy sleep.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs mile on mile convincingly, my tongue construed the forest no condition not to drape in, identical its pinkness from my open mouth as theirs, the nylon tapes between us reinforcing sentiment, a kind relief through constant focus but from what I failed to grasp, as did our language.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs who didn’t know I didn’t know, but that was what we were meant to be there for to begin with, yet I could follow them who followed anyone behind us through the forest where what seemed to know but was a shape without sufficient contour hovered, and it proved some trouble to me.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs concealing my disquiet like a shoulder bone the forebears said to hurry up now bury, but everywhere the dirt rebuffed my larger purpose, a fortitude from all the earth had frozen up against me, the paws of whom had brought me nowhere but to shame to let it drop for another mouth.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs the way a roof collapses, inevitably, and even as the wind must always push or it isn’t wind, it’s air, and I was air that had come to think of it, in some trouble to me the others felt no twitch of, or if they did, our language failed what must have been its purpose, or I won’t soon be a dog again.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs mile on mile convincingly, my tongue construed the forest no condition not to drape in, identical its pinkness from my open mouth as theirs, the nylon tapes between us reinforcing sentiment, a kind relief through constant focus but from what I failed to grasp, as did our language.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs who didn’t know I didn’t know, but that was what we were meant to be there for to begin with, yet I could follow them who followed anyone behind us through the forest where what seemed to know but was a shape without sufficient contour hovered, and it proved some trouble to me.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs concealing my disquiet like a shoulder bone the forebears said to hurry up now bury, but everywhere the dirt rebuffed my larger purpose, a fortitude from all the earth had frozen up against me, the paws of whom had brought me nowhere but to shame to let it drop for another mouth.
When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs the way a roof collapses, inevitably, and even as the wind must always push or it isn’t wind, it’s air, and I was air that had come to think of it, in some trouble to me the others felt no twitch of, or if they did, our language failed what must have been its purpose, or I won’t soon be a dog again.