Dog Town

A confident orange dog
trots down the road.
Dogs run free here.
Too free for my taste.
Old dogs rouse from a stupor
to bark at me when I walk past.
Packs of pals guard whole roads,
so that I must change my direction.
It’s a dog’s town, except at night
when the coyotes howl.

Trying to join in,
but not remembering how,
the dogs sound weak then,
pathetic in their domesticity.
What was traded for an easy meal
cannot be regained.

Then the howling stops.
And something is gone,
noticed not in the silence,
but in the relief the flesh feels.

The dogs settle down,
thinking dog thoughts
of what is lost,
too dumb to remember
what they forgot,
how to be wild,
what it was to be free.