Unbridled by Carl Phillips

Unbridled

 

To look at them, you might not think the two men, having spoken briefly

                and now moving away from each other, as different goals

                require, have much history, if any,

between them. That, for a time that seems longer ago now than in fact

                it’s been, they used to enter each other’s bodies so often, so routinely,

                yet without routine ever seeming the right way of putting it,

that even they lost count—back then,

                who counted? It’s not as if they’ve forgotten, or at least

                the one hasn’t, looking long enough back at the other

to admire how outwardly unchanged he seems: still muscled, even if

                each muscle most brings to mind (why, though)

                an oracle done hiding at last, all the mystery made

quantifiable, that it might more easily that way—like love, like the impulse

                toward love—be disassembled. The other man doesn’t look back

                at all, or think to, more immediately distracted

by the dog he had half forgotten at the end of a leash he’d forgotten

                entirely, though here it is, in his hand,

                and the dog at the end of it. What kind of dog? The kind whose

digging beneath the low-lying branches of a bush thick with flowers

                shakes the flowers loose, they make of the dog’s

                furious back a fury of petals that the dog takes no notice of,

though the man has noticed.

                How the petals lie patternless where they’ve fallen.

                How there’s a breeze, bit of storm in it. How as if in response

the dog lifts its dirt-blackened face from the hole it’s digging,

                then continues digging. Then the man is crying. No, it looks like crying.

                Now what good at this point do you really think that’s likely to do

either of us, he says, to the dog.