That silent thing between us

My Favorite Dog

Belongs to Marty who lives just
down the dirt lane. He’s Holstein
black and white and bares lip-curled
teeth in a greeting smile whenever
he sees me. Bosko knows me as an
old friend, extending his paw, unasked,
for me to shake. His are the eyes of a
wise old man and he sees the old man
in me and we have that silent thing
between us that knows what that all
means, different species be damned.

This morning, the sun hasn’t quite yet
breached the night-black line of an
eastern tree ridge and Marty’s truck
has conked out. I’m shooting photos
of a blue blossom that has erupted in
a flower pot over the last few days,
set the camera down, and go to help.
Bokso does all that stuff as Marty tells
me it might be water in the fuel line, how
it’s been acting up and sputtering over
the past week, nup, nup, nup the endless
minutiae that comes with talking motors.



Bosko settles into my slow gentle grooming
of the sides of his face, that warm bath
in a dog’s brain that constructs a bridge
that crosses time and space creating rifts
that souls are soaked in, filling up with a
shared knowledge of what really matters
in these worlds. We push the truck back
a bit, let it settle as we talk about Bosko’s
hind leg and hip, how he’s been favoring
it over the past few days and he knows
we’re talking about him as he presses into
the swanning comfort of my hands gliding
along his narrow face, leaning his weight
against the back of the passenger seat as
two traveled fellows share the consolation
of what it is to understand our brief places
in all of this, the reassuring touch that
it will all come to be as quiet as the seas
between stars and nebulae, that that’s okay,
and when I suggest Marty try the key and
it fires up, that these parting words and
goodbye pettings are only for a brief age,
an age of man and dog and dog again,
when all things find their unconditional
levels as water in a fuel line, as how the
broken sun finds blue burning in a nightflower.

Joseph Gallo
January 8, 2012