I thought they were gone.
Years ago, after moving into the new house,
we heard them often: they would start with a yip
like they were testing the air and how the sound would carry;
they would yap and yelp, building to an all-out howling.
We commented how glad we were to have them as neighbors
even as we brought the pets in for the night.
That was before developers flexed steel
and heaved black asphalt over the meadow;
before contractors’ puffed black smoke and pushed
down the trees; before saws swarmed over the logs,
before hammers pounded down upon all that once grew wild here.
It was before houses grew from splintered bark
left on barren ground; before cars came to sleep –
obedient dogs in the driveways.
We hadn’t heard them in years.
We figured they had moved on, away from town, escaping.
It had been so long, we didn’t speak of them any more.
We forgot we missed them.
Until this morning in the pre-dawn twilight,
they came padding back into our lives,
just on the edge of earshot,
still testing the calm night air.
How many of us awoke from slumber to listen
to them in the dark, goose bumps on our arms,
hair raised on the backs of our necks?
—
Patrick Dixon is a retired educator and commercial fisherman living in Olympia, Washington. His work is published in Cirque Literary Journal, Panoplyzine, Raven Chronicles, National Fisherman magazine, The Smithsonian and the anthologies FISH 2015, WA129 (2017), and I Sing the Salmon Home (2022) among others. He was also included in the Washington State Book Award anthology, Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (2020). Dixon is on the Board of Directors of the Olympia Poetry Network. He is a past poetry editor of National Fisherman magazine’s quarterly, North Pacific Focus (2010-2019). He received an Artist Trust Grant for Artists to edit Anchored in Deep Water: The FisherPoets Anthology (2014). His poetry chapbook Arc of Visibility won the 2015 Alabama State Poetry Morris Memorial Award. In June of 2023, he won the Cirque Poetry of Place competition. His memoir, Waiting to Deliver, about his 20 years fishing for salmon on Cook Inlet, Alaska, was published in 2022.
