Gather your sheep, call the dogs off,
wake from your dream of Carrero Blanco
kibitzing the chessplayers,
sunstruck on Tenerife’s citrine lawns.
A red truck races up a fogbound slope
and Montana looms its big sky behind
the sweep of windtorn, lightpocked clouds.
A collie with a checkered bandanna barks
and is joined by the false echoes
of a pair of city-bred visitors, both mutts,
both upset by the cold and the strange weather.
The collie answers to a coughing from the fog,
conferring figures divorcing round a surveyor’s tripod,
a clank of metal that sets Euskadi on momentary alert.
The mutts tumble from the rubberized bed
and shadow her sideways,
guessing its work and more than just
a rustic show, complete with chubby ghosts,
all bleat and runny noses.
Euskadi ignores them and begins.
Front paws jab the earth,
a feint to the left, then to the right,
a trot and bounce as she begins to lead
the ghosts along the mountainside.
Like froth in a bowl, the mill and tug
of two hundred sheep, transforming
under the dog’s dead-serious and ecstatic guide,
into a floss-scaled serpent,
weaving like Japanese rioters,
into the fog that billows out to hide them on their journey home.