This is from last December after the diagnosis and before my decision to go through with the amputation.
Dog and Snow and Now
It is thirteen—
the year Dog will leave me
through an invasion of bone.
It has snowed and melted and snowed, so
Dog glows on the other side of Ice
deep in the cold he so loves
where he plants three paws and a swoosh,
shakes, leaps, presses us
into the angel moment.
This is redemptive snow.
He smiles in the urban ski path,
examines every inch of sidewalk
and solidifies what has nebulized in me.
Black nose low,
he nudges the freshest track
identifies the cat, the truck, the man,
the handprints on an abandoned snowball–
then high,
the flight of every crow
the outline of each gray-sky seagull,
and the quick bristle of squirrel meat.
We stop and start together
single-filing it through the details of the street.