dot dot dot
in their sockets . . . when the man shouldered open the door, it swept
a half-moon of boards in the snow . . . she knows he’s been there,
that they’ve both been there, and she follows them, a century
too late . . . the line of pebbles where the wolf crossed the creek
each night, he found one huge pawprint frozen in mud . . . to this,
she adds Orion’s belt . . . that night he dreamed of a shadow,
an unlit edge . . . she follows the hush, unearthly, of smoke
and drifts . . . he woke to something like the sound of a bleat . . .
the evidence is everywhere: a crinoid stem, the shrapnel
of a shark’s teeth lodged in the bluff . . . water clattered toward him
on hooves made of stone . . . she subtracts from this one lamb
at the base of the escarpment . . . wind whets its knife on ice . . .
she should not go alone . . . and even the vulture, wobbling
on his raft of air, cannot see that far . . . but the past comes
with her . . . even the wolf followed a trail of dots diminishing
to that steep place where seafloor and sandbar collide . . .