Because death happens faster than that.
Faster to turn your head so I do,
swish and I'm out of it
but it's happening anyway and it's already happened.
Only my hearing can't help
going along,
not with the choking but with the voice of a man that's narrating it.
To breathe, to be alive, to live —
his warm breath.
You can't just turn off the television.
Poor stupid dog on the street waking up to its death.
Why can't it pause to rest up for this?
It's happening, I know about it
because behind the narrating voice the dog
is an underneath making no noise at all.
Its flip its fuss is drowned in silences
radiating out from its muzzle.
Who knows what the listener carries away of that in her body?
Doctors can now "see" pain as it's happening
in the brain, so they know it's there.
Inside the dog there must have been gas station lights
clicking on all over the dark continent
of its death. Not like strings of tiny Christmas bulbs,
not like anything that might lead somewhere
merciful. There it is again
in this morning's newspaper and I happen upon it,
see it and see it and see it,
a dog dying in three frames,
infinite much of the choking now left out
and no telling how long it took
to crawl out of itself
to a purer airlessness.
Three frames, beginning, middle, end,
three dogs in the throes.
Somebody took the video in the first place
to document one thing, somebody else is using it now
to document that documentation, evidence
of one thing, of another. Chemicals
wrenching a dog out of its life
bodes well for use on humans. Or: chemicals used on a dog
bodes ill for us. "Us"?
The dog can do three simple tricks.
It wakes, it chokes, it curls up upside down.
The other frames, all the other dogs
gone missing, these three just won't get lost.
The middle dog, thrashing,
can't gasp its way into either of the other two
bodies singled out that desert it,
one by breathing in, the other by expiring.