Porch

All day on the front porch of your house
which gives way to a garden of fallen stone,
a black lawn of shale, and the sea,
we have grouped and regrouped
round tables and railings and visitations
of dog with her tennis ball. Her coat is black
and spiked as an otter's; it will dry
to a slick of burnished oak when she's done.
But she drops the drooling ball again and someone hurls it
out into sky and before it has passed
the green blade of land that separates
the horizon's elements, she has flourished
down the slalom path to the point
off which my brother fell when he was two,
and dived for it. My brother's chin
was cut when my mother found him,
beached breathing on the slippery brace
of rocks unsheathed by tide
and after that this balcony was fenced.
The dog comes back and goes again.
Years later the vet tells you she
was injured on a day like this, burst her spleen
when she hit the water. But today
as always she brings the ball back and waits
for the arm's arc to point her down that path
where we ran as children, in towel capes
and swimsuits, our need for the beach
near equal to the dog's need for ball.
In her wake we return with pearls
and arrowheads, with the jawbone of a seal
and all the loam of childhood
pressed this afternoon from hand to hand
into a sphere that by nightfall rises
from the sea.

Rhona McAdam
The Malahat Review
Number 152
Fall 2005

© The Malahat Review, 2005
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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