My father always called it dingo logic:
a ragged insistence on looking
for holes in the fence.
(As far as I know, he was never in Australia. He watched
a lot of nature shows; maybe that’s where it came from.)
I thought of it last night watching her:
redwrapped hips, blacklight lips
that made me shine when I moved toward them.
I moved toward them as often as I could knowing
I was getting nowhere, but I kept looking, and yipping,
because it’s what my dad taught me to do.

Afterward I sat up late, a tad drunk,
reading Maxim.
When it comes to love and conquest,
that magazine shelves doubt, scorns failure. Every woman
is available, it says, every woman waits for you
to fill that startling vacuum that opens when a man
is not in her life. All you have to do
is smile correctly and be sure of your cock,
and the fence will fall.
With my head full of that type of forced charm,
I have run the length of that fence for years at a time.
My dad, my books, my TV shows tell me
there’s a hole somewhere. I salivate
on cue, pretend to instincts I keep reading about,
tell myself I’m a lone wolf when I’m really a yellow stray
looking for a dry bone. If this is dingo logic,
I do not understand how the dingos have survived.