Dog Fennel
By Robert Hill Long

1975

Look how she hugs them to her splayed knees, seated in jeans on a path worn down to native clay. On one side a puppy, snub nose, fur-fuzz,  the sleepy nod it makes to luck: chosen from a litter to be weaned and fattened, to live. On the other side, a grown dog.

Despite the young woman’s maternal smile, the dog’s ears are pinned back, its eyes widen wildly. It has been a father, here is the proof; now it is impatient to race back into the high, rampant aromas of the pines— grass scented with raccoon, creek-water between its legs.

But the dog obeys the woman, the woman obeys the photographer who directs where to display these pets, precious to her body that has not borne a human child. Her hair, the wire waves of it down to her nubbin breasts, is red—a detail you can’t glean from this Pan-X exposure. Her hair, this afternoon, answers clay that has crawled millennia down from the Appalachians. In her smile, no heat, but a forward, inquisitive light, spread among heat-stricken oak leaves in the grass.

2005

She is a woman with two dogs still. Other dogs: they hardly answer to her, grown too busy in the world beyond breast-length hair, grad-school puppies. The souls she hugged to her knees, impatient, sleepy, live only in that photograph—map to nowhere, though its clay-and-marigold pungency can be ratcheted into memory by grasshoppers in the heat of noon, by katydids in the heat of midnight.

I can’t forgive how the photographer—her lover then, before our world of human children—focused on a smear of light in the grass beyond her. How he left her, and the furry idea of family proposed in her protective embrace, to find a fixed point at the contact of grass and light. As though that would absolve him of the puppy rubbed out by a truck a month later.

Of his absence, years later, from the porch where the woman and I knelt with the father-dog’s head in our hands, and delivered it, with a shudder, into the next world, where dog fennel does not perfume the August heat, where love makes no sound as embracing as the rocking of katydids at midnight.

What to say of a man who worships grass and light as forms of leached silver? He, too, is an apparition answerable to rules laid down by time and chemicals. In his next world, even the memory of red turns black, and fixed, like an idea of night held by someone too young to have buried a dog in the middle of it.