By Alan Shapiro

Early mornings as I turned onto the gravel road to the bird sanctuary,
you’d start panting, pacing in the back seat, whining,
impatient to be let out and hit the ground at a dead run,
head cocked slightly to the side as if to query the sight or scent
of what I couldn’t see or smell of what you never stopped believing you would catch,
and never did. Always ahead of me or behind but never stride for stride,

you plunged, rustling, into and out of brush, you barked or didn’t,
you sniffed the freshest rumors of what had happened there while we were gone.
When you’d disappear, I’d call. And you only reappeared when I’d stop calling—
you must have thought my Here boy, come here boy was how I told you
not to worry, take all the time you need. Which is to say,

we each had our own experience of the experience we shared.
Our separate truths grew up inside those finite mornings.
They leaned on each other. But the mornings themselves?
Nothing outside them proves our ever having once been in them,
traceless as the sound of my calling after you
who rustled only as far into the understory as my voice would reach.

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Alan Shapiro’s most recent book, By and By, was published by Waywiser Press, England, in 2023.