We Walk

...these nights, the dog and I, through the lowering autumn, through winter's coffin, through breathless spring, and latest of all we walk through the summer nights, deep in the dark, long after the last light of the sun has gone. We walk, and through the month the moon comes and goes, and comes again, and Orion hunts what we cannot see, and eventually stalks off to where we cannot see him.

I wonder what it is he is after.

On some nights when the weather is shifting the air gathers itself in little pools that are now warm, now cool, as you pass through them on your way to wherever it is the path is taking you. When I was younger and unafraid of what I couldn't see I thought nothing of jumping into murky water. In small ponds and deep lakes, I would sometimes encounter unexpected springs just like that, now a cold patch in the water, now a warm one come to entice you under. In those years I had a mermaid alter ego but somewhere along the way gave up my glittering tail for legs, gave it up, after all, not for love of another but for love of the form I was born to. Still, these nights the pooling air is there like a little rhyme half-remembered from childhood. I note its presence, and walk on through.

We walk, and sometimes here and sometimes there I hear the phantom jingle of an invisible dog as it strains against its invisible chain, and I think that it must be the ghost of a good dog gone by, lunging after anything that might intrude on the little arc of its domain. I imagine it must hear us as I hear it, invisible in the night but plainly there. If he is barking at me, I do not hear him, and if I spoke, he would not hear me, too.

There is one stretch of the road where the light the street lamps throw is lunar and dim. Most nights there, I watch the shadows the dog and I make and then a third shadow joins us, traveling along just behind me and sometimes to my left and sometimes to my right, and it is there while I count out eight paces or ten, and then is gone again. We walk, and after that I sleep deeply through the night and dream, and in my dreams I am telling a story to an invisible listener, in my dreams the road unwinding is also a story I am following, and in the morning I wake thinking: there are so many words in my life that have started with these words: last night I took a long walk...