Illustration by Jane Gaston from “Lost Hound,” Robert Ashcom, The Derrydale Press and Millwood House, 1999, 161 pages
If you’ve ever walked the interstate
You know the dream of summer thunder with
No rain and heat in solemn surge like fate
Gone out of sync―where eighteen-wheelers brew
Their shouted, tire-born songs with diesel breath;
And fast food wrappers feed the session’s mood.
And standing on the bank, the hunting horn
A feeble blast in the ensemble, you too
Would wonder why the hound would choose to scorn
The woods’ cool anodyne and come each day
To stand head up and staring, stern tucked low,
And set to shun the road crew’s charity.
Waiting, it would seem, for me―although
Each time I came too late, and he
Had gone without track or trace to show
The way in grass―until by chance I tried
The other edge and saw fresh prints,
In barren clay, cut straight across the field.
Two weeks lost and now the eye is drawn
To track like rock to sudden earth, and breath
Is short, while still the voice insists upon
Its calling: “Roper, come!”―until a crawl
And certain hitch of skin confounds the mind,
And turning, there he was―in bones and flesh
Drawn taut in hunger’s pull, circling down
The wind to prove the ear’s uneasy truce with fear.
And when I crouched and called his name again,
He came to catch my hand’s unchanging scent;
And in that moment’s hush his eyes came clear,
As if to make a mirror for my face.
Posted June 5, 2021
―From Lost Hound: And Other Hunting Stories and Poems by Robert Ashcom, with illustrations by Jane Gaston, The Derrydale Press and Millwood House, 1999