Amy Murre
Dog's Skull Border
Long years, a bleached old skull sat on a wide fallen log, marking the territory, the property line that fringed the furthest trail. Another trail led onward into an unknown region of the forest, but beyond that point we were not to venture. It was the skull of a dog. Lying stark white and undisturbed against the damp black of the rotting timber, against its moss, stating: go no further. Beyond this, nothing is yours. Odd little guard dog no one knew – what dog had it been, when, its name, coat, or owner. It came with the deed, waiting when we arrived. To go beyond the watch of its empty eyes was to become lost. Such deep and strange places behind him. Echoes of the roadways swallowed, muffled, no guide to lead you back home. The earth not earth there but Soil a spring mat when dry, a sticking suck when wet. Trees tall and branchless trunks stretch dark and gray and blemishless to forty-foot canopy before leafing, before spreading. Maples, mostly. Beech. Ironwood. Far beyond the border, the few white cedar. They sink their roots like stilled feet into the muck, into its thick pure nutrient, as if they had come here from afar to stand and wait, very still and quiet. What has fallen is spectacular. Tangled, an ancient bridgework over the summer flood. Giants, six times the circumference of any that still stand. What had they been? Not snapped at the trunk, not broken nor lightning-struck, but pulled up out of their footing and laid down wholescale against the floor. At the base of each wrought arc of roots against the sky there lay a pit of deep black water. Ferns around, the green of sweet and soft dreams, feathered, graceful, arched and motionless in the gloom. Flowers mark the seasons' progress in this place, though late summer has none – when the frogs grow quieter as the black earth rises from beneath the early flood and the flurry of spring's wild growth begins to fall away from the skull lying on the moss watching me toeing the edge of my boundary, now the water has sizzled low.
Amy Murre lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She holds degrees from Cardinal Stritch University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has taught writing and literature courses at a handful of southeastern Wisconsin colleges. Her poetry has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and The CLIFFS Soundings. Photographs of her erstwhile night life are included in the Bar Code anthology from Little Eagle Press.
