Laura finally found the corpse
after a six-day search.
Bloated, its fur looking
more like an oily white pelt, it lay
on the banks of the Kispiox River,
its snout a compass needle to the current’s pull.
A fist-sized hole pecked neatly
through stomach wall,
ravens defending
a rope of entrails, like a dew worm coaxed
out on the stone.
We’d followed Laura’s weeping, her bent shape
mirroring her dog’s on the shale. The two, master and
carcass, seemed like parentheses
hemming in a long red thought —
Knee-deep in the river, stunned
in the cold flush that cleaves seeing
and feeling, I saw salmon dying below
me, jaws hooking to crimson, bodies in slow
undulation like spotted mercurial muscle
and further down, in silt,
the cycle reopening its mind with a tiny
but frenetic wiggle.
Later, she asked us to retrieve the white dog
and bury it nearby, though I felt the ravens, black-cloaked
and prosecutorial, had a case
and could be halfway done.