Although it was August and the mountain here holds a heat
like fat dashes of cayenne and ginger,
my neighbor Tom adopts a husky.
I don’t know her name so when she trots up the rocky driveway
to peer in my window, I call her cutie pie, or husky,
or mama, though she is pupless,
and fumble for a water bowl,
though she never takes from me.
She is a desert anomaly, a silver cotton ball
floating in a beige and cactus laden backdrop.
She is constantly panting so she constantly looks happy.
One winter when it snowed in the high desert
she laid sunken in a foot of snow on my doorstep,
everything white and fluffy, like her.
Belonging like her is seasonal, though she is always
smiling.
That winter I pat her butt and she yelped.
A chunk was missing from her thigh.
The fibers of her muscle shone like rose quartz
or freshly halved grapefruit.
It was too much for me to look too long.
I wanted it covered, bandaged, protected
from the air and her mouth
which obsessively licked it, nudged it, nibbled it.
It’s never gonna heal if you keep touching it
I said, when her eyes, black and glassy, became a mirror.
Eventually a thick, cloudy mucous crawled over the wound
which I learned was the result of a coyote bite.
It mucoused, then scabbed, then ballooned, then became
a hefty cyst she limped around with for four months. Every morning,
cutie mama at my door, her big black balloon hanging from the side.
I couldn’t demand Tom to help her, though I rehearsed it 300 times.
Maybe he is busy, maybe I should call a vet, doesn’t anyone want to help her?
On and on like that.
But even with a cone, dogs try to touch their wound.
They will tear the gauze right off just to be close to it,
to smell the rank absence of skin, to moisten what has never
been touched by air.
Before anyone interfered,
I would see her, sometimes,
hidden behind a pinon tree
curled in a secret crescent,
nose to wound, eyes shut, gently
tasting the opening.