It has returned, the single, perfect, arrested second.
Not water, not air, but the sudden, cold material
of a photograph that shines from the mobile,
a flat sun where the world of 2020 still breathes.
You are there, my JD, dog of shadow and silvered fur,
a creature made of velvet night and rain-slicked stone,
sitting upon the common, yielding throne of the sofa.
I remember the breath held in the lung, the slow
withdrawal of my own body—one step backward,
to frame the perfection of your posture, that good boy
who carried the sun’s full weight in his small, trusting heart.
You look out from that paper prison, your eyes
a confusion of dark amber, asking the simple, furious question:
Why the distance? Why did you leave the circumference of my heart?
I see the love, raw and terrestrial, and the puzzled geometry
of your canine soul, accepting the impossible condition:
Here I am, a devotion fixed in place, and there you are,
a universe away, holding the light that will take me.
That moment was nothing. It was every day,
the simple bread and wine of our companionship.
But now, it is everything. It is your afterlife,
the charcoal legend mounted on the mantel, the one true
document of your spirit.
And now, the iPhone, that casually cruel mirror, returns it.
The picture frame on the table, it holds your gaze—
a brief, still moment of your entire soul visible.
And then, the soundless shock: the pit of the stomach
emptied of its gravity, the world shearing clean away.
He is not here.
Not in the copper bowl, not in the quiet corner of the rug,
not in the heavy, warm fabric of the pillow beside me.
Not here. Not here. Not here.
What happened? How did we pass through that gate?
I am a clock broken between the flash of light
and this enormous, unforgiving present of empty air.
You will be ever loved, my little boy, a raw, persistent evocation
of all that is good in the brief life of a person.
But you are also the terrible, iron, clean-striking hammer
that rises up from the earth to break me with your total, absolute absence.
I accept the blow.
Hail Hail , The Gang's All Here 