Shyla is Blue Love Now
for Shyla the Sheriff, 1998-2011
You will find her
beneath the stairs
staring at your feet,
but seeing your head,
all white-masked and wolfie
Ordering in, ordering out:
You'll find her naked,
running mildly about,
rocking chair and bouncy
When the pizza man
Arrives at our doors
You'll find her lighter,
mightier, than the most devout,
far better than fighters and dividers
in Las Vegan, New Mexico,
Keeping me company
When you, my love,
Have gone insane and winds,
Solar in nature, terminating
The phones with crackle
And invisible light,
Make it impossible to speak
They find her in Las Vegas,
at two a.m. times two,
turning toward the TV,
With ears for radar absorbing
The stirring sounds of the Earth
And growing sicker, each day,
For debates about the deadbeat,
For laughter on the sell-out shows,
Her old lady fur coming out in tufts,
Ready for the door to open,
Mouthing the words, “out, out, out.”
You find her brilliant, lit,
deviate with experimental DNA
and sane, still as death: listening
for the Jefferson Airplane
To land on ice,
for the sound of scraping,
for the blue-shift echo
of the first sounds of defeat,
for the skeletal sleds
Off-shore, behind
Snow-dabbed trees
in British Columbia
You'll find her in forty eight
states of being on forty eight
motel room keys, thumbing dumb,
The door monkey: O, if she can
Only solve that one riddle,
The door nob, then she
Won’t need you … we, us;
Because she only needs
The scent of roses,
The yellow pedals, in a slow,
Elegant walk, a well-timed
Roll in the grass,
The one thing you can depend
On, like the rising Sun, the spring,
The Malamute shepherd wolf-bred
version of the moonlit Angel of Mons.
