Rex, Dancing

Sarah Webb

December 29, 2021

He watched the deer step like a breath 

out of the aspen into our dawn camp

and did not bark, his body tense under my hand,

as we stood caught by the quiet of the deer,

the scent of hoof and pelt on the fog.

Other times he could not contain his joy.

He splashed down the shore of the lake

and bucked in alarm when he stepped on a carp in the shallows,

galloped the path left by the water's subsidence

and flung himself, heedless, into me.

Once he knocked me down, hard shoulder into legs

and when I got to my knees, swerved back to butt me head to head.

I have a tee-shirt of coyotes dancing to the moon

and he was like that—wild and yodeling.

I remember him racing off through sageland,

free of our van and leashes and being good.

He'd skid back under the fence to leap close, then out of reach.

Laughing dog, loose on the clouds now,

won't you swerve back this way?

Sarah Webb divides her time between Corpus Christi and a lake in the Hill Country when she is not on the road. She misses her long traveling companion Rex, the most ill-behaved dog in the West.