Old Dog's Demise

by Suzann Kole

Luxurious with pain,
the fluted morning--
deliberate with cloud and doubt,
drivels in veery and bobolink
against a hard-pressed char
of dream: vague shades
drift as smoke widens
through constrictions
of time.

A forlorn smell of moss and pine
strum the exquisite tendency
to grin at small dementias
of dreary lament: the dog,
soured by strikes of sound,
is arrested and aroused
by little agents of suddenness;
a sum of small gestures.

A call; a cuticle of weed;
the raw dissonance of this dissension,
I stare into vivid air, fevered;
enlarged by dramatic designs
of hope; of old bones pressing
into losses so fractional
they could be fragrances
or vagrant margins of light.