To my old, black dog

When I was a boy
we sailed the seas of the world;
my body hot and trembling with fever,
I climbed the mast until I held it
with one hand and and one pijamaed foot
as you barked and cried below,
my head forgetting in clouds of rose candy syrups,
our prow through the cold slate waves --

When I was a boy
we trod the woods of the world
and when the ground would shriek with fear
beneath the steps of the colossus:
an old thing, and terrible,
knowing and mossy and precedent beyond all,
I held your snout and whispered to you
as we cowered in the leaves

When I was a boy
we marched through the snows
and through the fogs of that frozen country,
threadbare and hungry in those rich linen snows
with only your frost-laced brow, concerned,
and the wendigo in my brain

Now I lie freezing in my bed
your pounds twenty and twenty and twenty and twenty,
patient on my chest, tired breaths thinned with the years,
your black fur bristling on your bones
and all I can see, dim in your cataracts
that lonely road, the road, the road.