XII

by

Fate eater, the great devourer, the swallower of our loves
and pains: he walks down the trail with his poodle unleashed
ravenous, gleefully slobbering at our hands. She walks, on and
on he walks evenly down the center of the path, smiling at us,
and when the poodle must relieve himself she scoops his dung
into a plastic bag, then sets that bag gently, more gently than
anything else he does in fact, at the trailside, propped up
at the feet of a bench of a tree's broad roots. She is serene
in her furor, he is measured, she is careful with her carelessness.

We might imagine that she could have prevented
the deaths of our loved ones, that he can still
alter our futures, change our choices, drink
wine with us in our dreams and let slip
what we must to do escape. I do imagine it still.
And yet we are still as dead as we ever have been.