That Part in the Music

Once loyal to a cruel master,
the dog moves like a man who
not so long ago weighed a lot less
and is still figuring the difference,
what if anything to make of it.
It doesn’t matter, whatever
tenderness she’s known since;
the dog, I mean. They’re called
hesitation wounds, the marks
left where the hand, having meant 
to do harm, started to, then 
reconsidered. As if a hand
could reconsider. The dog 
wants to trust, you can see it 
in her eyes, like that part in the music 
where it still sounds like snow 
used to. There were orchards, still;
meadows. She’ll never be free.

Copyright © 2024 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“I adopted—rescued—a dog almost two years ago, who’d been very badly abused, was maybe thirty pounds underweight, and was found with chains around her neck. She’d somehow broken free and was stray for some time, unable to eat much because someone had shaved all her teeth down to her gums. That dog, Emily, is doing great now and is very happy. But I still see the tug of war in her eyes, between trusting and not trusting, between love and fear. It’s like I’m looking straight into my own eyes.”
—Carl Phillips