I get mileage not only out of my kids,
but also out of my animals, out of my pets.
And this one was inspired, if I can use that word, by the fact
that I realized one day, how different our dog's hearing
obviously was from our hearing.
How he was scared by sounds that we could barely hear.
And sometimes, things we couldn't hear at all.
"What the Dog Perhaps Hears."
If an inaudible whistle blown between our lips
can send him home to us, then silence
is perhaps the sound of spiders breathing and roots
mining the earth.
It may be asparagus heaving, headfirst,
into the light and the long brown sound of cracked
cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog if there
is a continuous whir because the child in the house
keeps growing.
If the snake really stretches full length
without a click and the sun breaks through clouds
without a decibel of effort.
Whether in autumn, when the leaves when the trees dry up
their wells, there isn't a shudder too high
for us to hear.
What is it like up there above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry, the newborn bird is suddenly
here, the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed."