I Should Be Working

[Instead, I wrote a poem tonight. Not sure about the first stanza or last line. - Ed.]

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Early in the morning, clouds are footprints
through a living room after a party.

A neighborhood dog covers the basics first:
what has changed out here
since it circled and settled into bed,
warm and content? What is still here?

It doesn't bark at me now, when ice is a colonial power. It watches me
navigate the sidewalk. It snorts at the snow. We make eye contact.

We agree to keep this secret until later,
when it will howl at my audacity
or at cars throwing slush; at the mail carrier;
at its own feral ambitions long since negotiated into this –
a surrogate den
bloodless food
and strange things to protect.

It barks at me in the thin sunlight.
Ice plots in the gutter. The day
has wearied us all.