Dogs of light and dogs of fire, <br />Dogs holding their breath, digging under chicken wire: <br />Dogs in Christmas, <br />Dogs in the sea, dogs panting under the clotheslines of <br />Panties, <br />Dogs waiting for me: dogs whose full mouths are filled with <br />Bones, <br />Dogs waiting on the knolls of other dogs’ tombs: <br />Dogs who worked for kings, <br />Dogs who worked for bums: dogs underneath the airplanes; <br />Dogs sticking red to revolutions; <br />As the poems are hurt on liquor, trying to find their blind ways <br />Home to Alma, <br />As the air fills unceremoniously with the cadences <br />Of the perfumes of other men who <br />Are not any of their masters, <br />The dogs who fill the streets and curbs, who through <br />Happenstance speak French and feed the alligators, lifting their <br />Legs to the red hydrants <br />Without the proper rhymes for the Ferris wheels of cheerleaders: <br />Another trick, for another bone: <br />Eating their dinner alone: dogs and dogs who knew me and who <br />I’ve never know, <br />Leaping and wining faithfully, and then by midnight sniffing their <br />Way through the most acerbic of vineyards, <br />Underneath the silver overpasses of the naked airplanes who <br />Never saw the same tears in their eyes, <br />Coming home to the doorways and the transoms that speak the same, <br />Giving off the same light as the lighthouses who pretended to <br />Know a world without wars: <br />Dogs licking their wounds, like lovesick men calling your name, <br />Alma, <br />And wishing only to sleep with the rabbit stated rattlesnakes in the <br />Unending shade swinging in the antebellum of your old world <br />Home, <br />Like a serpent in a playground of a tree, like a promise, like a bone, <br />You never intend to share with me.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/like-a-promise/
