Blackboard covered with a dust
      of living chalk, live chaos-cloud
            wormed by turbulence: the rod glides


and the vet narrates shadows
      I can't quite force into shape:
            His kidneys might... the spleen appears...

I can't see what he sees, and so
      resort to simile: cloudbank, galaxy
            blurred with slow comings


and goings, that far away.  The doctor
      makes appreciative noises,
            to encourage me;


he praises Beau's stillness.
      I stroke the slope beneath
            those open, abstracted eyes,


patient, willing to endure whatever
      we deem necessary, while the vet
            runs along the shaved blonde


- blue-veined, gleaming with gelled alcohol
      to allow sound to penetrate
            more precisely - a kind of wand,


pointing a stream of waves
      - nothing we could hear -
            to translate the dark inside his ribs


onto this midnight screen:
      the magic pen slides, the unseen's made -
            well, far from plain.


No chartable harmony,
      less anatomy than a storm
            of pinpoints subtler than stars.


Where does a bark upspool
      from the quick,
            a baritone swell


past the sounding chambers?
      You can't see that, or the clock
            built into the wellspring,


or that fixed place from which
      a long regarding of us
            rises.  It wasn't cancer,


wasn't clear, we didn't see, really,
      anything.  He's having trouble
            keeping up his weight;


his old appetites flag,
      though on the damp morning trails
            he's the same golden hurry.


I'm herding the two old dogs
      into the back of the car,
            after the early walk, wet woods:


Beau's generous attention must be
      brought into focus, gaze pointed
            to the tailgate so he'll be ready to leap,


and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs,
      needs me to lift first his forepaws
            and then, placing my hands


under his haunches, hoist the moist
      black bulk of him into the wagon,
            and he growls a little


before he turns to face me,
      glad to have been lifted.
            And as I go to praise them,


as I like to do, the words
      that come from my mouth,
            from nowhere, are Time's children,


as though that were the dearest thing
      a person could say.
            Why did I call them by that name?


They race this quick parabola
      faster than we do, as though
            it were a run in the best of woods,


run in their dreams, paws twitching
      - even asleep they're hurrying.
            Doesn't the world go fast enough?


We're caught in this morning's
      last-of-April rain, the three of us
            bound and fired by duration


- rhythm too swift for even them
      to hear, though perhaps we catch
            a little of that rush and ardor


- furious poetry! -
      the sound time makes,
            seeing us through.