buoy ovenbird My dog wouldn’t drink his water this morning. He stared at his bowl, confused, dismayed. And when I came to look there you were, eight legs slipping on the stainless steel rim, sipping or swimming or drowning, I couldn’t be sure. Who can be sure? Because sometimes the days feel like the relief of cold water, the kind that once came from the bathroom tap in my childhood home, Arctic in its frigid abundance; and sometimes I do a frantic breaststroke trying to reach the island where my sanity threatens to shear from the ocean floor and float free; and sometimes it all closes over my head and the sky is far away and I’m sinking down, down into the hopeless depths. But there you were, wet with something indefinite, inscrutable, body like a buoy bobbing on the surface. If I spared you maybe I could spare myself. So I found a bottle cap, a round red raft, and scooped you from your fate, and set you free. Free to live or free to die in whatever manner the future holds. It’s not the kind of freedom you might have wished. I feel that too, in my waterlogged bones. I’m only free to fade one day at a time, until you can’t tell the difference between me and the ocean I slithered from. Good bye. Good luck. I say, as you disappear into the fern fronds. I’m glad I found you, and I hope that you are too. 260623 what's it to you? who go blather from