We know from the wisdom of the ancients
That the only truthful canines are wide awake
And we also know, from our study of dog behavior
That they sleep 20 hours a day

It’s no wonder they twitch while sleeping
I’d always imagined it was because they were dreaming about running
But in thinking about it, it must be due
To dreaming about lying

Oh, no, I told another, and another
It hurts to emit it, but here’s yet another
For each action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction
So to bark out a sudden lie, my paws twitch back

So this lying dream state is not necessarily pleasant
From a puppy perspective
And we good dog-owners, not the kindest of masters
When we abide by that old maxim

A nifty bunch of loosely-related phrases
That might describe not something
But one thing or another
Invoke a state of mind
Leave a question unanswered
Or simply mirror a reader’s interpretation
Try as they might, some writers (not naming names) won’t go there
In fact, and I have this on good authority
I can’t

But there’s this other phraseology
Deliberately descriptive
A composite map of some consciousness stream
A multisyllabic diatribe
Assuming, despite superficial appearances
The function of prose, not poetry
The freshly unenlightened reader reacts with a shrug
And that stream of phonemes coalesces into
Some words with a title

I was walking away from the sun this morning
The orb having just barely peeked at my back
And I could look ahead on the sidewalk to see my 30-foot
Small-headed with perspective shadow
I scratched through what’s left of my hair
And could feel the strand of spider-webbing
Draped across the top of my forehead in my new, apparently daily, ritual

One hundred steps earlier
Walking between red-bud and soft-needle pine trees on my way to the back gate
I’d felt what must be a spider’s touch, a strand of web upon my skin
Adhering, stretching, breaking, and decoratively hanging
With me instantly forgetting what had become a habit in four days

Each of last three mornings we, that spider and I, had danced the same jig
The spider completing a connecting strand and me
Numbly brutish, breaking through
But the spider knew, somehow, it could deal with my lack of perception
Re-spinning the lifeline, resetting the mosquito trap
Catching us, its prey and its pin-headed nemesis, unaware

The last thing that came to my mind was
The music of the spheres is inexplicably inaudible
Evolution’s been a long road, but why
Does it steer clear of allowing me to hear
that most universal and fundamental of vibrations?

Maybe some compromise, some shortfall in a search for perfection
So I may perceive the threatening noise of the rich and famous
But not the soothing hum of the universe
I, were I a divine intervener, would have willed a different direction
Two classes of sound for human ears
Those that dogs can hear, and those dogs can’t hear
And I would put the echoes of my cosmic mechanism
In that latter group, to reduce confusion and midnight howling

We’re sitting in a circle, using our primitive wood-and-wire
(sometimes homemade) (sometimes just wood) sound catchers
To pull tunes from the ether
While a circle is only a projection of a sphere
And some may classify these old-time rhythms and melodies
Not particularly close to the pinnacle of human endeavor
It still feels like something worth doing — we imagine
We’re closing in on the music of the spheres
And our dogs, inside the circle, are sleeping

We had to start counting somewhere
While it could have been with zero, nothing
That’s no number of things, so we started with one
Those ancient digital mappers, with no mindset wrapping around zero
Just counted I, II, III

But as we know today, zero was not inconceivable
Before we count, we have 0, then
1, 2, 3 and so on up to 10, then
11, 12, 13 and so on up to 100
then 101, 102, 103, and so on up to 1000

Start with a number and add a few zeros
Each brings an order of magnitude
A quarter-million miles, three-hundred million citizens
Eight billion humans
Five million trillion trillion bacteria

That’s a 5 followed by 30 zeros
A trillion light years of stacked pennies
So take 1, tack on 100 zeros, and get a google
Imagine how deep into space that’ll take you
How many continents you could buy with that penny stack

But I know an even bigger number
After I googled who first thought of zero
And the number of bacteria on earth
I added a penny to my nearly bottomless stack
Another fraction of a light-year from home
And only the edge of the world to stop me now