ON FERAL SUMMITS WE GO

By the wild hills inside of forests the dogs watch. They can and do traverse an entire hill in a matter of seconds. It’s a sense beyond the senses that they use to pass bushes, fallen trees, old bits of bark and twigs, and then they seem on the coming up like butterflies themselves, - almost too fast for the photo. Overhead a plane goes sometimes a jet, sometimes a passenger liner, and sometimes a pontoon plane. But they have nothing on the canines, - nothing at all then- for they are off again, - a zipper, a flash, a dash, a quick rhyme ancient and new. Sometimes it’s a coyote they are after, and sometimes a deer, - while at others something as prosaic as a squirrel running. But all the time,- they themselves run majestically, dogs of a spiritual empire, dogs under a forested sun, dogs in the day and dogs in the dusk. Run, run, and run by the feral chaparral and the landscape that is at once terrene and verdant. We will see the winter like we have seen the spring. We will know the autumnal atmosphere like we experienced the summer moods. We will know all the unknowable and non-nameable ways of the forest- the places where sprites and devas stay, - the labyrinthine pathways where fairies and other birds fly. Look and look and look, - something is flying up the way just now-

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