We have grown cataracts since this time
last year—the dog and I. We pull back
the curtains and watch. Not much
has changed. Across the telephone wires
the mourning doves roost like notes on a staff—
a music, if played, would sound an arpeggio
of melancholy. The crows had another brood
that they are still babying into the winter,
big as the adults now but making those baby
crow crackles that ice through you
like a shivering rain. Starlings are nesting
again in the neighbor’s eaves. Brown thrashers
have come and gone. When my dog and I look
at the sky we see haloes and fuzz, our sight
clouded by a sameness. Most of my dogs lived
long lives, even when tender-hipped, brain damaged,
blind and staggering into bed frames and chair legs
searching for the pathway that leads outside.