Sum

All around you of course will die but when the fingers of
your left hand no longer can button

tiny and not so tiny buttons

you know you will die quicker.
Anguish more verb than noun hides their incompetence.

                         *

ANGUISH, duplicitous, hidden, can, for
a time, deny what promises never to return.

                         *

The elegant ocean
inside, frictionless, that moved as quickly as the eye once moved,

now when your anguished eye shifts
tips deadweight with inertia, almost splashing over.

                         *

Each morning you wake to long slow piteous
swoops of sound, half-loon, half-dog.

He is wandering in the yard.

The dog at eighteen who at sixteen began protesting each dawn.