When you travel with a dog in a car
You become familiar with the parking lots
At hotels and strip malls and roadside pull-offs:
The raw edge where pavement and civilization
Abruptly end, and overgrown woodlots survive.
Sometimes you will see vestiges of earlier human occupation:
Tumbledown wooden buildings, old stone walls,
Remnants of fencing, crumbling concrete structures.
Then the next layer of artifacts,
From this more recent cycle of land use:
Fast food containers, to-go coffee cups and empty plastic bottles,
Illegally dumped garbage half-burst from black plastic bags.
Your dog will be fascinated by the smells of all of these objects,
And smells whose source you cannot see:
The scents of all the dogs whose owners have ever walked them
Along the same dividing line
Between wilderness and domesticity.
But if you are like me
And a part of your soul cannot feel complete until
You have been outdoors each day:
Watched the sunrise, the pattern of fallen leaves on the ground,
The reaching of bare tree branches against the sky,
Then even as you lament the carelessness with which humans
Treat our wild places, both inside and out,
You and your dog will both feel a bit as if
You have been restored to some semblance of wholeness
There on the verge where the asphalt
Finally ends.
