When I’m Gone

You’re gonna miss me is what my niece tells my dog
as soon as she opens the door and sets down her orange-flowered backpack
with her 7-day plastic box of pills and the sandwich she didn’t eat on the plane.
She’s still wearing her woolen coat, even though the California sun is causing a riot
in the acacias, pollen dusting everything that stays still for longer than a minute.
Zeke is beside himself, licking her face in an ecstasy,
his tail whirring like it could power a small city.
Mornings they lie in bed for hours, dozing, waking, floating
in their own canoe on the lake of contentment.
I know you want me to stay, she tells him, fingers deep in his thick ruff,
squinting into his amber eyes, neither of them seeming to need to blink.
But I’ve got family in Philadelphia.
My brother, Ben, and Herb and Rochelle and Susan.
She names them all patiently in a cadence that sounds exactly
like my mother who taught her how to wash her hair,
put on socks, lining up the heel with her heel,
how to count, to print and even trace the loops of cursive,
how to roll up a used menstrual pad.
I know you’re gonna miss me, she repeats and Zeke sighs,
his lids droop as if weighted with blessings.
When I finally rouse them, I adjust the shower and leave them in the bathroom.
Above the sound of the water, I can hear her again,
You’re gonna miss me. And later in the yard as she brushes his coat,
his great chest grizzled now, and white in his eyebrows that furrow and relax
as she drags the bristles over his ribs.
She holds out a speckled biscuit and he takes it tenderly into his maw,
then sprawls on his back, legs splayed, the slanted rays
of the late sun rimming his ears in a fuzzy green glow.
She’s singing the oldest song we know.
She could be Keats musing on the Grecian Urn.
She could be Auden imploring, “Lay your sleeping head, my love.”
Even in the first moment of beholding the beloved,
there’s Romeo’s rough touch on Juliet’s arm.
All week long she chants the sutra of impermanence.
Only in sleep are they freed from time
as they lie belly to belly, breath to breath, her flat brow pressed
against his graying muzzle.