RICHARD REEVE
Dog with its Head out a Window
Love it, love it, love it, love it, love it.
I take a sample from the atmosphere.
The summer wind blows leftovers I covet,
my tongue a sop to suck up seasoned air.
The fields fly past, cows monitor the road
for veering yapping, moo and drop their horns.
I eat a breath of beetles, laugh out loud
to be the dog and tell off their newborns.
Good just to be, my head out the window,
yelling at nothing till they shut me down.
On, on it goes, the hare on the windrow,
gulls pecking dust in a field out of town.
Bark at the moon, apparent at midday,
growl at the goat in the bitten-back hedge.
Take up a front seat, my whiskers muddy,
to yelp at the dangler on a distant ledge.

Photo by Marchell Linzey
Dunedin-based poet Richard Reeve is the author of five collections of poetry, Dialectic of Mud (Auckland University Press 2001), The Life and the Dark (AUP 2004), In Continents (AUP 2008), The Among (Maungatua Press 2008) and Generation Kitchen (Otago University Press 2015). A chapbook poem-sequence, Horse and Sheep, illustrated by printmaker Manu Berry will be produced by Maungatua Press in 2019.
Links
Richard’s Auckland University Press page
Otago University Press page