Fetch

Again and again she comes back to me
to place it by my feet, today’s
old piece of flotsam or bonfire debris
dug out from the heap and blessed
with a kind of magic.

Dog-given, the least of things
may be treasure for a day.

And how she spends these days,
this love-struck mutt,
out along a neighbour’s wall,
comically shadowing the postman,
or, despite the wind and ice-flecked rain
that keeps every other dog indoors,
bounding out across this desolate park
as if it were a summer’s meadow, alive
to the possibility of play.

Hours, I imagine, she has spent already
running like this between her home
and mine, her world and ours,

to bring me a stick,
to chase that stick, to seize that stick
and then come back with that stick so tight
between her jaws it sometimes seems
she will never release it, that she has changed
the rules and very purpose of the game,

and had I the strength 
I might lift her clear
or she might lift me clear
of this rain-locked planet.