this room and everything in it

Mastery

(for Basho, Zooey & Vico)



The dogs do not think
but instead are the flush joinery of drive and muscle,
heart and intent, now, and now again
aloft between the greening crusts of fields
and June’s high-ceilinged
heaven.
For all their flight they’re stillpoint,
flashing lure and paradigm
of how to live and how to love on earth,
completely, now, and as if their sensuous kingdom will
have no end.

They do not think:
felled tree to cross, dead-fall to manage,
midge-thick morning to pass,
but inhabit already
the ample bliss on the other side:
stream ripe for drinking,
the boon of newborn mud,
the fresh rinds and flash of rabbits, and
grasses churned with lust and smudged with fox musk—
all that they enter and, thus anointed,
become.

Dorene Evans