David Trame

Night Run

Your dog walks with you in the dark,
his nose skimming a line
on the street walls, his ongoing vein of sky,
you absorb through the leash the force of his joy,
the shuffling at your side, the eager rummaging
into the swishing dirt, the wallowing
in the invisible arrows of the earth.
And streets so dark that emptiness twinkles,
you can’t smell them in the day,
in the filtered, fumbling pictures of your world.
Hold on then to the wand
of your vibrating leash, sense
God’s blades that have no sideways
cutting into the forests of the streets,
hear paws and nose grasping the instants
and teasing silence, relentlessly.

David Trame is an Italian teacher of English living in Venice. He has published in magazines in the US, UK, and Canada.