Lingua
When dogs learn to speak our language—
when one of them masters the art of curling her long
tongue high against the bony roof of her mouth
bringing it sharply down behind her lower teeth
expelling her breath at exactly the right moment,
then cones her mouth around the trailing vowel
and the first word is spoken—perhaps No or Toy—
when that one dog, having learned to speak, tells the others
how it's done and the knowledge spreads among them
(messages on fence posts, stumps of trees, the soft leaves of mallow),
when they discover how to flick ells off the tips of their tongues,
to hiss esses through their teeth, to click their kyus,
when they hit upon a way to say why with their lipless mouths,
when they unriddle the problem of the kay, the jay,
master not only words but syntactic structure, idiom, conjugation—
when we then ask our own dogs or the first
dogs we come to what they remember of their dreams,
what they see when their eyes look into the flames of our fires,
what they hear outside the door in the wild cold night,
how it is, when a man dies they know it,
and at that exact moment in another room they begin to wail—
when we ask them these things, I wonder:
Will they answer, or lower their eyes, say nothing?
Oregon English Journal, Fall, 2002.