Don't I Know
By Rose McLarney
A man who was not to be trusted
once owned the hound. Don’t I know
the kind. But I won’t walk the way
the stray dog does,
head down, side-stepping, skitter.
He’s pulled taut, fear hauling against
his troublesome tendency
towards faithfulness.
Yes, he runs the ridges and feeds himself.
His feet are fast, his teeth sharp.
But what I watch is how he stops to pluck
sweet blackberries.
Hound on the hill,
sun-warm fruit in the hound.
There is a tenderness that persists.
When he bays above us,
a longing song, let me turn
to take a new man’s arm.
"Don't I Know" appears in the current issue of The Kenyon Review. Rose McLarney is a poet I brushed shoulders with at Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers, where she now teaches as the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow. She lives in Madison County, where she raises "a wide variety of livestock." Her book, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, will be published next year by Four Way Books.
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