what dogs do
photo by man of aran
many dogs, in memory of many dogs the signs at the rest stop on Highway 97 all say: many dogs have died here and just over there a stone wall runs knee-high— launch pad to run to— the edge of a 300-foot drop that’s how many dogs in the ready chase: of a scent a bird the whistle of a train the wind down the river have died here to fetch the siren only they can hear in fealty to the fine-tuning of their nature obedient to the perfect pitch of what dogs do how then to rest knowing just what dogs do: they run run run into the ether and all the way down or chase down another fine and perfect love all the way down the road with us
The poem feels like someone trying to make sense of the wild, beautiful recklessness that lives inside every dog.
Those signs on Highway 97 hit hard, as if the landscape itself remembers all the dogs who ran too far.
The stone wall as a launch point is so vivid you can almost see the excitement before the danger.
You feel how dogs chase the world with their whole bodies, following scent and wind like nothing else matters.
The poem understands that they hear a call we never will, and they follow it without hesitation.
That instinct is part of what we love in them, even when it scares us.
The question of how we rest, knowing this, feels painfully honest.
Dogs run toward life with a kind of joy we can’t help admiring.
And they run toward us with the same devotion, which is its own kind of miracle.
In the end, the poem becomes a soft ache: loving dogs means loving something that always runs ahead of us, sometimes too far.
It seems that some of us humans also seem to follow the scent, unleashed and without assessing the danger involved.