By Patrick Kindig

yet here we are, watching
one gray dove fleece & fluster
another. We watch the pecan tree

shiver, shaken alive by
fluttering wings, those grim birds
bumping uglies. For ugly they are

& ugly the thing they are
doing: no slow caresses, all
rough tumbling & the touching

of fronts. In between:
the sad, low call that tells us
it is mourning doves doing it,

even when they vanish
among the clumps of green pollen
& pecan leaves. There is something

awful about it, something
profane, the way, the day we received
the ashes of our dog, two weeks

dead, we cried on the couch
& I laid my head in my husband’s lap
& suddenly there was something

moving there, pressed against
my ear, & when I opened his fly
the dog was still there, still sitting

in his urn in the middle
of the coffee table, waiting
for a permanent place, watching all.

---

Patrick Kindig is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection fascinations (Finishing Line Press 2025), the chapbook all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press 2019), and the micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press 2016) as well as the academic monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (Louisiana State University Press 2022). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, and other journals. He currently lives and teaches in rural Texas.