Berlin

The way the dogs, years after the wall came down,
kept running beside it, where it no longer was –

And the dog I took from the shelter
for a hike in hills where I let it off the leash,
and lost it.

Or the dog I owned with my boyfriend in college –
and then I left the boyfriend, and with him the dog

that later remembered me on the street
when a stranger was walking it.

Both this way and these ways
for at least a moment a day, the brief still
stop in my life that says you were, and are somewhere still.