What I Guard Now

Pooch Poetry, Vol. 2— narrated by Shadow

Something moved into this house that doesn’t smell like anything. I hate it most for that. No scent to find. No throat to plant against. Nothing I can do the one thing I was built to do to.

I used to guard simple things. Diesel trucks. Cheap cats. Easy wars. A bark was enough. A stance was enough. I was never afraid of anything I could see.

I can’t see this.

You want to know what I guard now. A door for a step that stopped. A bed where he stops breathing right around two every morning.

Nothing leaves this room without going through me.

I keep the watch.

The house talks at night, if you know how to listen. The furnace clicks on like something clearing its throat. The floor by the window remembers every foot that ever stood on it, and says so, quietly, at 3 a.m. There’s a coat by the door that hasn’t moved in a year. I have stopped expecting it to. I have not stopped checking.

That’s the part nobody tells you about haunting. It isn’t the loud thing in the dark. It’s the coat. It’s the floorboard. It’s a smell that used to be in a room and now the room just smells like a room.

I keep the watch, still.

I lie here, ears up, listening to a grief that makes no sound, that sits in the room like it pays for nothing and owns it anyway.

Some nights I want to bite it. Give me a throat. Give me a leg to plant against. Instead I get silence that wins just by staying.

Nothing leaves this room without going through me. Not the silence. Not the cold side of the bed. Not whatever it is that visits him in the hour even I can’t reach.

God. If that’s still your name in this house. You let something in here even I can’t drive out. Say something back. Say anything. I’ll take a growl in the dark over this quiet.

I keep the watch, still. I keep it even when it isn’t working.

Thirteen winters. Scars for less than this. None of them weighed what this weighs.

There are nights I stop being a poem about it and I’m just a dog with her teeth bared at nothing, snarling at a room, because snarling is the only prayer I know that doesn’t need an answer to still count as one.

It goes through me first. Every night. For as long as I have breath to spend.

And when the breath runs out, let it be said plainly, in whatever book keeps track of this: she stayed. Not that she won. Only that she stayed, ears up, until there was nothing left of her to keep the watch with.

I keep the watch. That’s the whole prayer. That’s the only line of it I ever needed.

Vox Canis, Vox Veritatis.