The barks and yips of the pack rocket around our alley. Each night their walk is that of the insomniac. Their path through the neighborhood resembles the scribbles of a toddler; they thread through our yards, consider the staircase that leads not to the stars but to our front door. We are gullible to think they corral themselves to the open fields far outside the city. They want nothing, actually anything, maybe everything we have, our lives bare and on display behind the lens of our glass plated homes. It’s like when the finch in the elm looks like it knows I am looking at her, tilts to the sky but doesn’t take flight. They are the song-dogs; they are the contour lines; they are the topography. Yesterday, I counted twenty waxwings in the hackberry, their comfort improbable, here then gone, blown away like winter leaves. At evening the tree’s bark caught the galvanic light of the sun then was doused as it set. I remind myself to look for the oval pawprints in the morning.