Fence

Content note: This poem contains images that some readers may find unsettling.

Fence (see in Gallery / Store)| Image by Bruce Harris

The buckshot entered our dog

blood spackling his hind leg.

Shot for following a scent across

our border barbed wired between farms.

Warned us point blank

the neighbor would shoot our dog

if he again crossed our land to his.

I was four years old.

The farm was sixty-five acres of

legally defined straight-lined edge.

Even with the prairie and the

horses gathered in cloudy 

ear-pricked shadows droop-necked

their doughy-heeled noses nosing

through grassy pasture split between

ours and his.

Fall leaves blazed and rippled 

in our pond reflecting his trees.

Crows passed like arrows

some perched waiting on the fence-line.

Our dog, a thick-haired ten year old

golden, forever weathered and burred

found him prone on the back porch

looking to me then nails gripping the wood

pulling sliding slowly forward

having spent what he had

limping and dragging many 

acres to our door.

Tail not quite wagging

not quite still

a light trail of blood

raked the slatted floor.

Eyes wide and leaden and

purely confused

grateful all the same

as if to ask, “what happened?”