A Dog, Maybe

Light falls away from the desk where piled-up pictures crack
and stick to one another. Trilby, Brutus, Zeus, the hounds we owned
in the collapsed years when over and over the Dane’s deep bark
announced the Fed Ex truck in my nightmare and I refused
the red, white and blue mailer, containing my husband’s version
of farewell. The dogs were hostages, forfeit to our preference,
their heads pushing at my thigh. I paste what I have left
of them into soft, black albums: gleaming pelts beside the palm trees,
the sun through a venous ear, a halo of wet light around a muzzle,
on the porch next to a laughing couple. I tell myself the man
in the Kodacolor snap could be any mongrel, a buccaneer for voles,
a slick adventurer, his nose disappearing into the next door pasture.