It’s about the dog, but not really about the dog,
which is why I continue to cry at odd moments
popping up in my day like advertisements on
social media several weeks after we found her
dead in her crate, a cold log of dachshund,
the other two dogs who had slept there with her
for fourteen years eager to scramble out and pee
on the fallen toast of palm fronds outside, come back in
to crunch kibble and take another nap, do all the normal
dog things that they do, as if they didn’t notice anything
wrong. It’s about how they knew, having curled around
her body sinking into that foreign place all night,
but also about how they really didn’t know, or want
to understand, how they look up at me now every time
I walk in the door, my arms empty of her, then settle
their heads on their paws with a single, mutual sigh,
and give her plot on the cushion the girth of a large belt.
Or it’s about how I project these feelings onto
them, the loss, the space, the childhood she held
in her comedian’s body that encapsulated
both of my children and the time that we lived
in this house that we can now clean of her final
traces to put on the market for a family with young
kids or pets, who want an acre of yard with too many
mango trees and scenery that Facebook identifies
as India instead of Miami. It’s about the mangoes,
which the dachshund scavenged for only one season
and inexplicably never ate again, but also not really
about the mangoes, which I don’t have energy to gather
anymore; she preferred the half-rotten avocadoes
anyway, sneaking over to the pair of trees marking
the property line by the fence every time I let
all three dogs out at night, coming back with
the mottled shell of fruit in her snout, or the sugary
sapodillas, brown as rats, rooting like a pig in the brush
as if for truffles. It’s about this nest but really also not
about this nest, emptying though not vacant yet, built
by a raptor though I am now a sparrow or whatever kind
of bird a bird of prey hunts. But oh, how I recall that raptor,
how I still want to eagle the sky and look down
on the world the way I did when I felt it owed me
a galaxy in it that I didn’t have to earn or catalogue
or think about when I would have to downsize it away.