A Love Song For My Dog.

My dog is a very fine beast. She is small and strong and very wild. She wears her domesticity like a coat of oil on her fur, something tenuous and slippery that could give in a strong rain or a quick scuffle. We take to the streets at night and her wildness reflects a beast hiding inside of me somewhere, we bounce a savagery back and forth with the rhythm of our legs and our breath and I am sure that if I dropped her leash she wouldn't leave my side, at the same time sure that she'd light out running as fast as her legs could turn over. The purest form of joy she knows is movement. When we're reunited after long separations we race down the hallway and turn sharp turns and leap high, spirited leaps off of the furniture and over all obstructions. We growl fiercely guttural sounds that terrify the uninitiated but just mean play to us.  We tear cast off t-shirts ragged in our frenzy of excitement. She knows exactly the time to pounce and can hear my clumsy human movements before I make them. I know her strong and short temper and give in to her pulls before she grows frustrated. I imagine she thinks the same thing about me. We collapse onto the floor in a pile of motion and then stillness. She lays her head on my legs and I use her as a pillow and we breathe in the same slow time when we succumb to exhaustion and finally sleep.
 If I were less human and more beast, if I were a wild thing, I would want to be this dog, in a more doglike state. We would leave the muzzles and smiles we wear to put others at ease behind. We would discard the protocols and conformities of domesticated life and run when we wanted to run, walk when we wanted to walk, kill lesser things to fill our bellies and take long leisurely rolls in tall grasses and freshly dug earth. We would chase the things that could outrun us, for the sheer pleasure of speed and the respect it garners. When we caught them, we'd thank them with a quick death, ready to submit to the same fate if our legs and lungs should fail us. We would die old, clever deaths, with many stories and scars and our names spread far and wide on the lips and tongues of those we'd crossed. We are content, for now to run forever, in the middle of the race, no start and no finish line in site. The place where we are the happiest is before the turn to home comes into view, when the highway looks endless and we can imagine ourselves from far above, joyfully striding long brave strides through the night.