His eyes cannot believe what his legs are doing. Off the leash he is stotting on this winter beach, springing in place like a lamb, now bucking, flexing the way years ago I watched two fawns as they climbed Rose’s Hill ranging against each other in fifteen minutes of play. Lefty the leftover, last of his litter, whom I brought home in trepidation because of that, though the sheen on his coat and a brainy light in his eyes promised that he might learn not to mess in the wrong places and chew up shoes, and grow with no hurry into a border collie, a sheep dog full of agreeable surprises, who might be like Patches was, knowing when the blueberries are ripe and raking an arm of the bush for a mouthful. I have witnesses to that, and how if you told Finnbarr it was raining, he’d return from the door to his denning place under the coffee table. If his tail swiped a sheet of paper off that table, he’d pick it off the floor and bring it to me with a sorry eye, his mouth as useful as an opposable thumb. And once when I flicked his nose with a finger in play, he took my hand as lightly as a nurse might and looked me in the eye to say, Please don’t do that again. [End Page 34] Lefty, Lefticus maximus, Leftospirosis, McLefcowitz, we have worked our way around mutual distrust. You were worth more than one trip up that old cart road in western Maine, far from the doggy Walmarts and the shepherd with a BS in Nantucket Studies. If you will give me a throaty hoot after dinner like Magnus does, or watch birds out the window a half hour at a time, we will do the beach early for sunups and to flush the occasional fox from the tall grass, and hear the wing-thresh of a pair of tundra swans even before we see them. When I do the math it’s clear you may be my last dog: last night I couldn’t recall who wrote The Bothie ofTober-na-Vuolich. Finally it came to me and I said “Arthur Hugh Clough” out loud, glad to have dodged another blown fuse. You looked up from the rug, your eyes agreeing, Yes, that’s it. That’s it. [End Page 35]

Brendan Galvin

Brendan Galvin is the author of sixteen collections of poems. Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965–2005 was a finalist for the National Book Award. Recent collections include Ocean Effects and Whirl Is King. His translation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series.

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