Why The Bird Dog Watches Poem by Paul Kesler

The Bird Dog watches
because it is large;
couchant,
its forepaws
splayed beneath it like the
legs of dried grasshoppers.

Through centuries of
human oppression
and millennia
of eerie, withered seasons,
it watches with covetous eyes.

The Bird Dog watches because
it is fierce,
jaws serried with more rows of
teeth than are found in
the depths of arroyos,
snarls that echo profoundly
past uncharted cathedrals wiped
from the slate of drowned
civilizations.

The Bird Dog stares
because it's a mirror
watching every move you
make
before you even make it,
every laugh you laugh
before slinking down the
subway
that leads to the national job.

The Bird Dog emulates the
fuming steam that
churns in the depths
of your
anger, the plumb dropped
through the well of
foggier days than eyes can
reconnoiter.

The Bird Dog watches since
no one can stop the love
that always eludes you,
because the
page-turning boredom
that sneaks
from the fringe of your
eyebrows
to the tailfins of your pathetically
dried lips
takes its cue
from the siphon of dawn
and the drain of dusk.

The Bird Dog watches because
it doesn't vanish
and never slides your way,
because it howls in the
wrong direction and
refuses to scratch when
all other dogs would scratch,
floating so far
past a distant, crashed horizon
that if you walked from
your life today,
and searched the globular
planet,
you would never find it.

You never know just why it shivers
whenever the sun returns
with a new supply of cornfields,
or why its ears shrivel
whenever harlequins dance from the night
with babies in their arms,

but
flencing alarms
from the
undeciphered universe,
the Bird Dog staggers upright,
and chows down
as many global disasters
as it can possibly chew.


Failing to swallow
the next
Armaggedon,
it painfully scrawls its
last will and testament
on the backside of eternity,
mutters regrets that it couldn’t do more,
stifles a curse
and walks away….