The dog sleeps on the couch as if he’s crash-landed.
Cold light from ABC Breakfast is bluing the walls
and I’m antsy as the blackbird beyond the window
fossicking the same ground over and over, the shadows
and the leaf litter, where no-one else wants to look.
The dog and I both need to be walked. He drags me
like I’m emotional baggage he’s desperate to escape.
We are linked by more than the lead, more than
the family of mammals, the family of pasts we want
to forget. Both of us are rescued creatures.
And while I know it’s a mistake to confuse kinship
with intimacy, my mind shies from the thought that
he stands ahead of me in the long queue for the grave.
My feet spin the earth like a treadmill until my blood
does its rich work and I start to see the world again
as more than a cold pebble hurtling through space
pursuing its own adventures. Everything is standing up,
brimming with its own life and like the blackbird,
I can’t leave it alone, going over and over this world,
looking out through eyes ringed with gold.
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