Poetry by Terry Trowbridge

“Three dogs”
             By Terry Trowbridge

The Nile has its jackal
disguised in his regal headdress and muscular man’s body.
Walking the stone crypts of pharaohs and commoners
in air that stands still for centuries,
Anubis overlooks offerings of toys, slaves, food.
He is a scavenger who whiffs last wills and
obelisk testaments among the secrecy of
coded gods.

The Yukon has its wolves.
Families. Packs. Clans. Territories of scented stones
and mapmaking by the art of smells.
The Canadian north forever remembered
by Inuit carvers, English novelists, the curious tracking noses
who howl behind explorers. Explorers who wrote our history,
wrote how the wolves hunt along the river in packs.
I am alone, a loner, lone; and they pursue me,
hungry, curious, and wise.

Coyotes have the Niagara river.
Their Roman name, Canis latrans, sounds martial, Rubicon and Tiberian.
The dog brings order to the borders of nations,
by scavenging the pieces thrown away
or by eating the rodents that swell from the barns.
A general of antiquity who marches alone or
builds cities with his brothers.
A household dog of household gods.
A river cleaner. Protector of borders made by great cities.
Impossible to trap alive so he is indisputably the dog of the moment.
The river dog of respect beneath the monuments of 1812.

- Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Lady Lazarus Experimental Poetry, The American Mathematical Monthly, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mathematical Intelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, (parenthetical), Borderless Magazine, Fine Lines, and many, many more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, Hamilton Arts & Letters, EpistemeStudies in Social Justice, Rampike, and The /t3mz/ Review.

Copyright©2022 by Terry Trowbridge. All Rights Reserved.