Jan Wagner

dachshund

“How would you, comtessa, see the world,
if you — let’s say — had been born as a dachshund?”
        — Jakob Johann von Uexküll to his future wife, Gudrun von Schwerin

as a forest. a hunting trip. a ball
that rolls to me and as it reaches
my rug, takes a leap, escapes as a rabbit;
as a warm afternoon, that stretches
and stretches farther out as i do myself,
before another dispatch

of fragrance comes in. it is a system
of signs: hither!, shout the thistles
with their spike-mittens, and every trunk portends
a message, like the waste paper does, textiles,

even the burst bicycle tubing
of an overrun snake.
the fox that runs behind the brook
each evening is the setting sun.

with the excitement of the explorer
who follows the deer tracks;
the wolves and their movable kingdom; and the badger,
striped in black and white like licorice-stick-

candy, lingering in his darkness;
to speed like a pneumatic tube through tunnels
towards the stinging smells, to hunt
him who is a giant, a plump, skittish colossus,

bristling, stiffened in his coat,
while the voices come closer — at the moment
before their arrival, before they burst through clay and earth,
and the two of us are yanked into the light.