greenstorm

Dog on the Floor in the Pet Food Aisle
(Ruth L. Schwartz)

It's so simple, really,
the tenderness we need
lives everywhere,
there is no place it does not live,

and we seek it
savagely,
and we flail and hurl and fling
ourselves toward the brass ring of it,
as if it were a narrow chance,
a shining and unlikely prize...

It is hard to pinch the air
between our fingers, but we are determined.
It is hard to survive by denying
ourselves, but we are accustomed.
It is hard to live inside the flawed
and gritty chambers we believe ourselves to be,
but we have strapped our bodies in,
we watch our lives through airplane windows,
small and dim and scarred,

and even so, life noses up,
rolling before us
like a black dog,
its brown eyes steady as the sun,
its belly in the air, asking for touch.

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