The swift one, that sleek and powerful dog,
the hunter of the steppe wolf.
You can still see them on Fifth Avenue
and along Park, tethered to women,
whose own elegant frames are glancing
in store windows, as they race
a haute couture blur of mannequins.
Sometimes, through a cast-iron fence
or a row of boulevard trees, these dogs glimpse
an expanse of grass, and the muscles ripple
inside their flanks, a thwarted and ingrown
orgasm Poised as they are, forever posed,
about to spring forward, if only to run down
the shadow of a crow passing over the ground.
At first you believed you could live through
this, survive in their midst without being changed.
The mind a pure pool of rainwater, nothing
could disturb. Not by fall of leaf, nor frog plop
against the still surface of your most resolute state.
But the tribute they exact seeps ever so slowly
out of the skin, each pore giving up a single grain
of salt, shining like a diamond. They take your flesh,
hand on the shoulder, cupping your balls, & mold
it in a manner suitable to their needs. They dress you
in fine suits. Don’t slump, posture has purpose, strike
a pose that commands respect. You walk down corridors
of oaken plush, past landscapes and the still life
paintings of Old Masters dimly lit under the hoods
of brass lamps. Taught to damn by silence
or a steady gaze: This one stays, this one out.
And the things you hear yourself say,
you never thought would so easily pass
your lips. The spit in your mouth become acid.
But worst of all is what you hear yourself think.
That nothing matters, that no one is watching.
The clear pool gone stagnant, greenish—leaves lining
the bottom, a muck of decomposing bills. Small insidious
things breeding in those shallows. Each one another
you, gasping for air, rising to claim its share.