Psalm (After the Animals)

by Joseph Randolph

The dog’s been gone ten winters, bone-vanished, creek-gnawed, myth by now—and still she calls it, not namewise, but gutward, where grief nests in a pit of salt. Not loud. Just in the throat, just enough to reopen the place where language scabs.

She descends the hillpath in hush rhythm, soles clagged with rainrot. Cedar tongues peel back from bark like old liturgy. The girl—not girl, not since the orchard wound her dress to thorn, not since the thigh-bloom and afterward hush—walks with the gait of someone who remembers too well how her body once believed it was chosen.

In her hand: rotwood, soft as marrow. In her mouth: the silence after a name is unsaid.

The boy—who laughed into her thigh, who said stay like a psalm cracked sideways—did not stay. He unbecame. Became ash-tray name, pubside rumor, verse in a cousin’s wedding toast.

Now she counts mushrooms like relics. Haloed under bark, pale as skin under first frost. Each one a failed gospel. Each one waiting.

A hawk calls overhead, the cry sounding like punctuation to a sentence she never finishes. She does not look up. The sky has become impassable.

She kneels by the old stump, dog-shaped in memory, ringed with moss that glows like bruised saints. Her palms find the wet wood. Her lips open.

Not prayer. Not name. Older than that. What came before names. What Orpheus forgot to sing.

She presses her forehead to the stump and waits.

Waits.

Waits for the wound to reopen. For the hill to remember. For the dog to come limping back through rainlight, tongue wild, eyes full of god.

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