He is home. He is unsteady on his feet, but he is walking a little. The morphine may be helping. He goes back to the vet tomorrow. We will see.
This afternoon when I could take the indoor loneliness no longer, the phantom dog beneath the desk tapping my shins once too often, my eyes burning, I walked down the creek to the bay. A silver maple grows here, incongruous this far west. A trash tree, it grasps for sky so quickly that it willl shatter in a wind. Some I have planted as seedlings now top seventy feet. A softer wind will rattle leaves, flash green leaf top and white reverse in turn.
A kestrel swung out and back above the creek. She landed on the powerlines above an acacia, a squirrel full her size chattering abuse. Something in her right talon, small and long-tailed — a mouse? too slender — and the bird tugged at entrails, swallowed. A shift in the breeze: two bright, translucent wings against blue sky. A dragonfly, then, snagged from the moist creek air, and the kestrel snipped each wing. Eyeing me, she let them flutter pellucid and diagonal to earth, samaras of illuminated insect maple.
