I had just left the trash at the curb
and turned back to the house

when I had a flash of fantasy:
a pug was sitting 
on the porch, speaking to me
of winter. 

Back in the house
with coffee and comfort now,
I can’t recall what the dog said.
Rolling possibilities over themselves

I try to jolt myself
into falsehood, telling myself
it was not a pug
but a wolf
and ancestral truth had been
offered to me at last,

but I know it was a pug.
I know I cannot recall the message
precisely because
I want it to have been a wolf.

I want to have been chosen
by something
stereotypically pure,
faithful to what my whiteness demands of me:
that any time nature speaks
it must speak to the brown in me
and not to the hybridized me,
most certainly not to the aging urban poor
me, the crumbling me who 
spends his vision quests at a keyboard.

What’s happened

is that even when I am given a vision
I can’t see it
because I’m wrapped in a lie
and cannot see the truth 

that I’m a pug here myself,
a pug in winter; cloud forming
before my nose, so close to my eyes
I am blinded by
my own breath.