I like the green iridescence of the magpie’s tailfeathers dragging along fencelines, robber bird like the jay and theft, I like theft, stealing from the gods even if you always pay because isn’t that the way things change?  But no to sacrifice, unstaple the red tags in the ears of dull eyed cattle going to market.  They’ve forgotten what they live for—we’ve forgotten why we eat them.  Once Syracusa’s altar took seven hundred at a time, same blood, same gore and screaming as on a battlefied where I’m told no one ever writes about the smell of excrement, blood and burning flesh.  Slaughter then is what we eat or what we wear, a way of life and lately the no fur folks do infomercials that take my breath away when I’m mindlessly cycling at the gym or I’d switch the station and avoid such singular cruelty: the fox gnawing its leg to escape the teeth of the trap clamping bone, the mink doing backflips in their tiny cages, so horrible I’m transfixed. I’m trapped the way I am in a story or poem when someone hurts the dog, or once removed, imagines the guy who hurts the dog— that dog a window to the abyss within— my father, for instance, drunk or sober, kicked the dog or lifted the bloody bird from the gutter. So when this dreamy dog hurting lives on in our protagonist, an otherwise ordinary man, haunts him in his quiet moments I don’t believe it, waking as I do to the local news, the horse left standing in its stall, hooves curving up as long as scimitars, the stories of teenagers or middle aged men amped on nothing better to do than drag their dogs from pickup trucks. I like the guys who find the dogs and stay with them long after other guys have left them to die.  I like the reunions best, the old burr covered mongrel who waits for our return, who sees in us what we can't see in ourselves—I’d forget sacrifice its stupid slaughter or how one summer day I watched my old dog stalk a pigeon under the oleanders, then snap its neck before I took a step, a sacrifice to me the little god who could have saved it.