Once loyal to a cruel master,
the dog moves like a man who
not so long ago weighed a lot less
and is still figuring the difference,
what if anything to make of it.
It doesn’t matter, whatever
tenderness she’s known since;
the dog, I mean. They’re called
hesitation wounds, the marks
left where the hand, having meant
to do harm, started to, then
reconsidered. As if a hand
could reconsider. The dog
wants to trust, you can see it
in her eyes, like that part in the music
where it still sounds like snow
used to. There were orchards, still;
meadows. She’ll never be free.
Copyright © 2024 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
