Cozy Campfire #670-72
a littlest pet shop ekphrasis.
Try to reproduce the conviction
you had woven to believe that brigadoon,
in their unlikely truce they line the
campfire and no smoke rises;
the tent too small,
the boat unbalanced,
the marshmallows stale,
and they don’t say:
We cannot leave,
There is no warmth –
But gaze unblinking
with sneezeweeds in their eyes.
Sitting contently in the bright night of
your bedroom they tell all:
The cub lifts the teacup to his maw, held by you to his rubber paw,
and listens with a smile mold-same as the day he’d cooled
while the deer tells him what his Mother had done to hers.
The spaniel snoutward in the popcorn,
which does not rustle, (– which is for the best,
so as not to wake anyone up,) chews up their PVC slippers;
the thin ends of their oars,
and as all three
hover marshmallows over the flame
they notice that these too have been chewed,
twigs collared with bite marks
that are surely too large to belong to this small hound.
That night you dream of them at one another,
venison torn beneath its coat
and its throat in the jaw of a grizzly.
The crush of bone on bone and
a handful of the bear’s flank
like bitten towel between the spaniel’s teeth
still smelling like cinema,
fur flossing the fangs.