At the Dog Park, Late

Abstract

At the Dog Park, Late Susan Comninos (bio) At this place, where the dogs bark and run,and the sun is largely gone, and the dayhas cooled, two trucks slowly circle thispark within a park, alone in a spit of grass and the weeds that stop upholes. At their lowest point, along a chainlinkfence, the green climbers know thatall windows must be grown through or blocked. It is late, and the air is soft:quiet, but for the sound of two motorsand of gravel scraped: that roughed-upgrind, when a car doesn't stop. My dog races for the road, pantomimes a social call:his card laid out on an imaginary plateset beside a public water bowl. First, oneman creeps his rig, then the next. They trawl for drugs or sex—or ticks to takehome to their wives. What morecould they possibly want? A killin the ocean? To eat kelp, as open -mouthed as whales, unabashed by theirshared appetite? Drivers, there's [End Page 171] nothing here but a womanand her dog: both small, and dumb enough to sit and wait—for the bones of explanation to be tossed,like a ringing phone, at their feet—or to gnawat their own, honed stubbornness. Say, "Go!" and the pair will stay, only later to speakof what there was to be gained—knowledge,witness, pain?—an ending for the story. Aghosting of intention, before it was gone. [End Page 172] Susan Comninos Susan Comninos is both a journalist and a poet. Her journalism has appeared in the Atlantic Online, the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Jewish Daily Forward, among others. Her poetry has most recently appeared in the Harvard Review Online, Rattle, Subtropics, the Common, and Southern Humanities Review. She teaches in the English department at the University of Albany. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press