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By Frannie Lindsay

I read to my dog from a takeout menu
so he can sleep. When he tires
of that, I talk to him
about nothing, and when I run out
of things to say, I make up words
to a song with whatever
array of notes and breath streams in

the way the clean wind did
as we rode once, and
I rolled down the window a hair
and he sat up without effort, glossy nose
in the speeding weather, eyes half closed
in the light that whizzed through his fur
like the hands of a friend
who had missed him.

Frannie Lindsay's first book of poems, Where She Always Was, received the 2004 May Swenson Award from Utah State University Press.
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