The Getting-Lost Drive

There are love dogs no one knows the names of
—Rumi

Last night we slammed doors till the paint chipped.
Today I’m sucked dry as an old bone.
But even in misery, this white-haired,
sunburnt man who glowers through beetling
eyebrows and stomps around the house
in ancient peeling shoes and a crimson T-shirt,
this man and I are wedded at the marrow.
So we take a vow to drive in silence.
In the car we turn left right left by hunch,
down the darker roads, toward the higher trees.
Away, away, from everything we know,
trying to get lost, hoping something will surprise us.

Headed home, outside Holly Springs,
we pass the bait shop with its live crickets
and iridescent plastic crawlers,
where our five kids once stood rapt
before the display of gold-dazzler feely things
and notched red or green ones,
finally making their choices which five
sparkly creatures they could buy for a dollar
and line up on the dashboard, where the lures
would shimmer and soften in the sun
on our long-ago happier get-lost drives­

And we pass a black Lab, mostly bones,
that plods through sun-scorched clover.

No matter where you go­
along the gravel logging roads, outside
the rusted trailers, toward Water Valley, Tula,
Coontown Landing, Wyatt Crossing­
you see unwanted, unloved dogs.
Nobody misses them, no child wakes
to mourn them, secretly leaves water
hoping they’ll return. These ditch-spawn,
failed hunting dogs, abandoned in the pine woods­
I don’t know what their longing finds them.
Alone or shuffling in packs,
past howling, nearly past hunger,
they keep walking, it’s summer,
their tongues swell, their feet burn.

*Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of two books of poems--Blue Window (Archer Books, 2003) and Five Terraces (Wind Publications, 2005)--and two chapbooks--The Trinket Poems and Walking Wu Wei's Scroll. She has received four Pushcart nominations, a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, the Poetry Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and two Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, online, and in anthologies. She teaches at the University of Mississippi and has held Fulbrights at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and Uppsala University, Sweden. In 2006 she is President of the 1000-member international Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. She also teaches yoga. She and her husband, Peter Wirth, have five grown children. This poem first appeared in CutThroat where it was a finalist for the 2005 Joy Harjo poetry award